


It seems wasted now

by DaaroMoltor



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Stiles, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Spark Stiles Stilinski, Stiles is Pushed Out of the Pack
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-06-07 06:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15212723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaaroMoltor/pseuds/DaaroMoltor
Summary: It's been months. Months of lonely days and lonelier nights.And Stiles can't understand what he didwrong.





	1. Chapter 1

# I

The whole thing had begun like this: a man had stumbled out of the forest, still sopping wet. Unfortunately for this man, his stumbling had taken him straight into the path of a semi, which had had to swerve off the road to avoid hitting him. Stiles’ dad had then been called to the scene, nodded along to the story of the half frustrated, half shell-shocked, trucker and then gone to check up on the still dripping, but by then blanket-covered, man. _His_ story had been… well…

“He just kept talking about _fish,”_ his dad had said, approximately three hours later, poking at the Bolognese that Stiles was unsuccessfully trying to micromanage from his designated position by the kitchen table. “In the _forest_. Of all the strange things that have happened lately, that just stuck with me for some reason.”

“Yes, yes, sure, but dad, I swear to God, just _a little bit_ of vinegar-“

“I don’t like vinegar,” his dad had insisted.

“You’re not supposed to _taste_ it!” Stiles had exclaimed, and then abruptly hissed when his slightly too exaggerated gesturing had pulled at the scrape along his arm that he’d been trying to clean.

His father had frowned. “You sure you don’t want Melissa to take a look at that?”

“I’m _sure_ I want you to put vinegar in those tomatoes,” Stiles had persisted, picking the discarded cotton round, wet with alcohol, up again.

“You should have thought of that before you got yourself hurt and left the cooking up to me,” his dad had said. “Think of it as a deterrent – maybe you’ll be a little bit more careful before you throw yourself into danger next time.”

Stiles' shoulders had stiffened at this, but his father was too preoccupied with poking at a piece of ground beef to notice, and so he simply went on: “You’d think that all those superhuman friends you have would be able to spare you some of those scrapes you keep getting,”

Stiles curled in on himself, pretending to examine the wound closely, but his father had now turned his eyes to a jar of dried herbs and did not see. “But then again, I swear you used to manage to give yourself a bruise every time your mother or I blinked – and that was before you could even walk.”

Stiles hadn’t even had the heart to stop his father from throwing more oregano in the pot.

“Anyway, I’m thinking those fish might be more up your alley than mine. Maybe you should give the rest of the guys a call and see what they can come up with?”

Stiles had eaten his over-oreganoed, under vinegared, Bolognese and hadn’t called anyone.

He _had,_ though, paid careful attention to the unusual amount of talk of fish and fishing in town the following week, of beautiful and colorful scales glittering in a pond that no one seemed to be able to agree on whether it had or had not been there before.

So Stiles had- _fuck,_ had gone ahead and _assumed._

He’d even – and in retrospect, this is clearly where he’d gone wrong – been _grateful_ that it hadn’t been anything more complicated. Mermaids – he had dealt with those before, could deal with those again, right?

Fucking _right._

Stiles had gone into the forest and been smacked down so hard for his hubris that he had felt like he was a part of some Greek mythos.

After that, it had taken him a week and a half, a D on his neglected English essay, and a lot of groveling at Deaton’s feat.

The creature was something called a Berberoka.

And Stiles hadn’t taken any fucking chances this time. He’d gotten two books, one with illustrations – and yeah, those had looked pretty much exactly like what had haunted his nightmares those past nights – and cross-referenced the shit out of everything he found. Which had been a treat, of course, since one book was in Greek and the other in Latin.

But this had made the improbable conclusion that Stiles had come to all the harder to doubt.

“Fucking _crabs?”_

Because, yes, apparently the creature of the deep – the Lovecraftian bogeyman-looking thing that had towered over Stiles and roared so loud that sometimes he could have sworn he _still_ heard ringing – had a weakness. And it was Sebastian from The Little Mermaid.

Stiles had briefly entertained the notion that “crabs” might be some sort of acronym. Or slang. Or code.

But nope – actual fucking orange crustaceans. And then had come the task of figuring out how to apply this knowledge. He’d entertained the notion of crab-grenades, toyed with the idea of laying out crab-perimeters, pondered how one might build crab-nets, sketched on plans for crab-launchers, speculated how one could go about setting off underwater crab-avalanches, hypothesized around weaponized crab-gas, and – half desperately – deliberated the viability of a giant crab soup.

Then a wet and quivering girl turned up shaking and wide-eyed at the station.

Stiles hadn’t even remembered to turn off the police scanner.

He’d just stood up, grabbed his jacket, and applied the infallible principles of Pokémon to the whole problem.

And it’s not until now, standing here and watching the Berberoka wail as it burns, that he remembers that _fire_ is weak against _water,_ and not the other way around. He frowns at the scene in front of him. At the red flames licking high in the sky, at the black and acrid smoke that billows.

Then he bends down, tugs a few blades of grass loose, and throws it at the burning creature.

They catch in the wind and flutter uselessly to the ground.

Stiles stares at them for a moment. Then he turns around and heads back home.

The time he gets to decompress is…

His dad calls from the kitchen that the girl’s gonna be fine the moment he’s through the door, and Stiles is too focused on the task of getting his sodden trainers to release his feet to give an answer that contains actual words, instead of just vague grunting noises. Inside, though, his heart starts beating normally again for the first time in several hours.

“Hey,” his father says then. “It’s probably nothing, but you wouldn’t know anything that might explain why there’s a man at the station who’s swearing that he saw Audrey Hepburn over by the preserve, do you?”

… Zero. The time he gets to decompress is _zero_.

Stiles stares at the wall very hard and focuses on all the reasons why it would be a bad idea to bang his head against it.

He clears his throat.

“Not really!” he yells back, resuming the task of extricating his feet. “I’ll ask if the others have seen anything!”

“I’d appreciate it!” his dad replies, and Stiles slinks upstairs to take a shower.

To finish the make-up-essay he’d persuaded Ms. Nichols to give him.

To write the entry in the bestiary for the Berberoka.

To try to learn about Bismarck’s economic principles for his test tomorrow.

To try to figure out what the hell might be running around in the forest with Audrey Hepburn’s face.

Sleep will most likely have to wait until tomorrow. Or the day after that.

Old habits have him dragging his phone out of his pocket without much input from his brain. He’s thumbed open his and Scott’s conversation before he’s really thought about it, and has already written “ _hey, have yo“_ when he actually properly looks down.

Scott's latest text is visible above where he’s typing.

_Alison just called. Raincheck?_

Stiles stares at it.

The time-stamp is a date. Not the hour, not the name of the day; _a full date._

His phone only ever writes out dates if more than a week has passed

He hits the back button.

Derek’s thread is immediately below Scott’s, though there’s a week or so between when they were last active. He can see the entirety of Derek’s last message without even opening the conversation:

_No._

Stiles squeezes his eyes shut and lets out a mirthless, self-depreciating, chuckle. Then he locks the phone, throws it at his bed, and snatches his towel from where it’s hanging on the corner of his dresser.

A few days later he goes to confront Audrey Hepburn.

She is, unsurprisingly, a succubus. But, she hasn’t killed anyone and so he isn’t out to kill her.

He tracks her with magic, and perhaps that’s why she doesn’t even attempt to hide what she is.

She notices him coming stomping and her face immediately morphs. Literally. She gets to something somewhere between Lydia and Megan Fox and then stops with a disappointed little _oh_.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, coming to a stop and rubbing his hands over his face. At least his issues are good for _something,_ even if he doesn’t much fancy the inescapable proof of them. “Listen, could you, like, move on to someplace else?”

She swears up and down that she won’t hurt anyone, that she’s practically a normal girl looking for a bit of sex, and is that so wrong? Stiles points out that he said _move on,_ and not in the afterlife sense, just to a town that’s not within this pack’s borders, please.

She agrees, he points her in the direction of the nearest college, and then he reports back to his dad that there won’t be any more movie-star sightings.

“Shame,” his dad says, smiling at him over his cup of coffee.

He’s got his uniform on; the paper unfolded in his lap. Stiles collapses in the kitchen chair opposite him and gives a hum of agreement. “Makes for a nice change from the ugly mugs usually around.”

His dad raises his cup of coffee in a mock toast. “You’re alright, though? No damage?”

Stiles shakes his head.

“Nope. Completely non-violent. She wanted to get down on all this,” he gestures grandly towards his body, “but I declined and sent her on her way.”

His dad freezes with his mug halfway to his mouth. Raises his eyebrow; looks caught between disturbed and disbelieving.

“ _Really_?” he asks.

And suddenly Stiles remembers that there should have been other people – _attractive_ people – there; that Stiles shouldn’t have been the only option for the succubus. _Why the fuck else would she go for him?_ His dad doesn’t – _can’t –_ know that he goes to these things alone.

He opens his mouth to deflect, but then his dad continues: “You turned _Audrey Hepburn_ down?”

Stiles blinks for a moment. Then the corners of his mouth quirk upwards. Bless his father for always thinking impossibly well of him.

He hides his affection with a joke: “I do tend to prefer my sexual encounters without the side of possible death.”

His father’s eyebrows climb.

“Not that you’ve had any,” he says, pointedly.

“Of course not,” Stiles agrees easily, and it’s not even a lie.

He can’t even manage to get people to stick around for the regular sort of company; how would he ever manage to keep anyone around long enough for actual _sex_? Where would Stiles find the time to even _try_ _?_

His father laughs, shakes his head, and takes another sip of his coffee.

They sit in silence for a while. His dad goes back to his paper and Stiles just sits, enjoys the quiet and the rare company. When he breathes in deep, his ribs still ache a bit where the Berberoka got in a hit but, besides that, he’s unusually pain-free.

It’s nice.

After a while, he notices his dad’s eyes resting on him.

“What?” he asks.

“Stiles…” his father says, putting the mug down on the table. “You know I would want you to tell me if there’s anything I can do to help you with your… activities? If it ever gets to be too much, I mean.”

A prickle of fear shoots through him at the mere _idea_ of getting his father any closer to the supernatural than he already is. He’d rather die than face even the _possibility_.

“Of course,” he lies. Then a bit of truth: “I know I can always count on you.”

His dad smiles, but it is a little bit sad, like he knows that Stiles isn’t exactly sharing all the facts. He puffs out a little sigh, turns his eyes to the floor, and taps his finger against the porcelain of his mug.

When he looks back up, Stiles’ heart sinks, because he looks like he’s going to push the issue.

He doesn’t though.

But what he says instead is almost worse: “They look out for you, though, right? The others?”

Stiles can only pray to whatever creature above that might have any control over these sorts of things that his emotions don’t actually show on his face; that his expression stays patiently neutral even as he feels like he’s being sliced open.

“Of course they do, dad,” he says, a lie so outrageous that he can hardly make sense of the words as they leave his mouth. “They wouldn’t let me get hurt.”

He apparently sounds earnest enough, because his dad holds his gaze for a moment before he nods with a pleased little smile.

“Good,” he says.

There’s something in that simple word – a hint of comfort maybe, or of contentment – that makes Stiles’ skin crawl with shame. That makes his heart pinch and his throat ache.

And suddenly he’s devastated, _furious,_ not for his own sake, but for his dad’s. Why couldn’t they just _put up with him,_ keep a bit of a better eye on _their_ fucking territory, just so that his dad doesn’t end up sitting alone in the kitchen wondering why Stiles isn’t coming home?

It’s too much. His breathing starts to go uneven.

“Hey dad,” he says, standing. The chair scrapes loudly across the floor, and maybe it’s a bit abrupt because his father startles. “I think I’m gonna hit the sack.”

His dad frowns. Twists his arm to look at the watch on his wrist. “It’s not even nine yet.”

Stiles shrugs, backing away in the direction of the stairs. “Early morning tomorrow.”

“It’s _Friday_ today _,_ Stiles.”

“Oh,” Stiles says, stops. “Yeah, right.”

He shifts awkwardly from foot to foot under his dad’s scrutinizing gaze.

“Didn’t you kids use to have your…” his dad gestures vaguely in the air, “Your get-togethers on Fridays?”

Stiles hasn’t actually, for all his other creative and implausible injuries, ever taken a baseball bat to his stomach. He imagines it would feel something like this though; blunt and hard and unyielding, compressing his midsection until it hurts, until it shouldn’t even be possible for it to constrict this much.

Stiles doesn’t know why he does it. Doesn’t know why he insists on torturing himself, on prolonging his pain, but he fishes his phone out from his pocket and taps the screen on.

There are no missed calls.

No missed messages.

And the pack-meeting started almost two hours ago.

He shoves the phone back into his pocket and looks up at his dad and smiles. “It’s not really that kind of date, dad. Don’t you know how uncool it is to have a standing appointment?”

The corners of his father’s mouth twitch upwards, but he doesn’t look entirely convinced. “It’s been a while, though, hasn’t it?”

Stiles swallows. Shrugs. Doesn’t let the easy smile drop. “Eh, maybe. But what can you do? All of us are seniors now, we don’t really have as much time for werewolf-stuff these days.”

His dad’s eyebrows climb. “Except the monster-hunting you were just doing, of course.”

Stiles covers his slip-up by pointing finger-guns at his dad and clicking his tongue. “ _Precisely._ Who wants to hang after that? You get all sweaty and bloody and stuff. They have super-smell, I’m super smell _-y_.”

“Uh-huh, right,” his dad says, raising an eyebrow and looking pointedly at Stiles’ unusually clean clothing.

And Stiles stares at him, smile still on his face, and is so tired of lying – so fucking _exhausted_ with never actually _talking_ to anyone – that he feels like he’s going to cry.

“For reals, though, dad,” he says, one last push. “That was it for tonight. We went in, we went out, everything went well, and everybody went home. And I really am beat.”

His father looks at him.

“I can see that, son.”

There’s a certain tone to his dad’s voice that sends alarms blaring inside Stiles' head.

“Well, if that’s it, then I think I’m just gonna-“

His father just talks over his rambling, quietly patient. “You sure you don’t have too much on your plate?”

Stiles swallows the lump in his throat.

“I told you I would tell you if I did, dad,” he says, has to avoid his dad’s eyes. “Like, not even a minute ago.”

“Not only with the monsters,” his dad replies, voice even in a way that brings immediate awareness to the fact that he’s the sheriff. “I mean with your life, in general. With school, maybe?”

Fear shoots like lightning through his body, a cold sweat breaking across his skin.

_He knows!,_ something small and terrified shrieks in the back of Stiles’ head. _He knows!_

Of the things Stiles fears most, this is the only one that makes the list that doesn’t involve actual death: that his father should somehow believe, or think, or _find out_ that Stiles’ “ _normal_ ” life suffers because of the supernatural shit that he’s up to.

Because Stiles doesn’t really _have_ a normal life anymore, is the thing. Especially not now, with the pack’s little disappearing act.

And _school_ … School’s the damn looming tower of _doom_ when it comes to normal life. There are fucking papers and tests and homework, with _grades,_ telling Stiles – telling his _dad –_ how good he is at pretending, at keeping up appearances. And if his father were to know that Stiles’ unexcused absences have made a major uptick lately, that he keeps getting zeroes on homework, that he has started to sit in the back of his classes because sometimes he just _can’t_ keep his eyes open…

_(_ _That there isn’t anyone else who’ll go out and deal with the things that kill people, that there isn’t anyone who will update him on the assignments they’ve gotten while he was away, that there isn’t anyone else that will sit up all night to get the research done.)_

_But he **can’t** know, _ a more rational part of him points out.

Because Stiles has been _so fucking careful_ to keep even the slightest hint of struggle away from his father’s attentive eyes. To keep him from thinking that maybe Stiles can’t deal, that he’s trying to do too much, that the supernatural is taking up too much time, that maybe things are getting too dangerous, that maybe Beacon Hills isn’t the best place to be, that maybe they should _move-_

Stiles crushes that speeding train of thought brutally before it can take him to places where he can’t deal.

For reasons that he can’t explain to himself, the thought of moving away from Beacon Hills is enough for cold sweat to break out across his body. For his insides to turn to lead and his heart to thrash heavily in his chest.

It’s the one thing that’s keeping – at a time when he’d really rather give the whole American high-school system the finger – his academic career on track.

Because what if he was forced to choose between his dad and Beacon Hills?

“All A’s,” he says, and thank god that that, at least, is still true; makeup work and extra credit be praised. “Report card came in last week, if you want to see?”

His dad smiles and it breaks the weird tension hanging in the air. “We should put it up on the refrigerator.”

“Oh, you know what, suddenly I seem to have trouble remembering where I put it,” Stiles says and sets off towards the stairs. “Night, Dad!”

“Goodnight, son.”

Stiles stomps upstairs and no more words are said between them.

The wards on his room are undisturbed, so he doesn’t even bother turning on the lights. He closes the door behind him, tears his clothes off, and rolls himself into a small ball underneath his blankets.

He closes his eyes.

If he cries himself to sleep, then… Well, then there are at least no werewolves around to smell his tears.


	2. Chapter 2

# II

One night, weeks ago by now, back when the feeling of abandonment had still been fresh and ever-present and stinging, Stiles had come to the conclusion that he was the human equivalent of a plaster cast.

Not the fun, artsy kind – the kind you’d get when shit’s gone bad. The one you’d be happy to use while things were broken and wrong and hurting, but that no one in their right mind would keep on beyond absolute necessity. That you’d probably like to be rid of earlier than recommended, if Stiles’ previous experience is anything to go by – be it with plaster casts or friendships.

That said, he doesn’t actually think that the pack withdrew from him on purpose. They’re too nice, too many of them too used to being outcasts, for him to really think that they’d do something like that. It’s more that… that they’re suddenly busy. With things other than being murdered by various creatures of the night. They’re flirting, and studying, and looking at colleges, and… and Stiles has just kind of _slipped away_.

He doesn’t think that they’ve even noticed. The pack is different now from what it was in the beginning. It’s… less nebulous. More clearly defined.

And the borders that have been drawn placed Stiles firmly on the outside.

A lot of the progress in the pack can be pretty immediately connected to their alpha finally starting to get his shit together.

Derek’s… _different_ , these days. There’s a tension that Stiles hadn’t even realized had been in his shoulders that has suddenly bled out. He smiles without looking like he’s caught himself doing something he shouldn’t a second later. He treats the pack less like an army and more like a family. He’s… slowly but surely becoming a good alpha. A good leader.

Stiles would be elated– _is_ elated actually – except… Except it doesn’t seem to extend to him.

If Stiles joins a conversation, Derek reverts back to his non-verbal gruffness. If Stiles enters a room, Derek smile dims. Where Derek’s suddenly found patience and quiet praise to give to the others, Stiles still only gets silences and hard glares.

He suspects that the obvious disfavor would be fairly devastating even without the massive crush Stiles has been harboring on Derek for the past couple of years or so.

But, for all of that, Stiles still kind of can’t get over how _happy_ they all seem. Erica’s self-confidence is beautiful, Boyd’s dry wit cutting, Isaacs affection no longer quite so tentative. Lydia seems to have internalized that she doesn’t _have_ to prove anything. Even Jackson’s become less of an ass. And Scott… well, Scott’s always been too good, too kind, for Stiles. Allison’s perfect for him; they bring out the best in each other.

And even if he has to watch all this from the outside, it still makes something within him warm with pride, with pleasure, because he _knows_ that he was part of making these people this way.

And that, he supposes, is the good bit about being a human plaster cast; he gets to make things better. Make them whole.

He wonders if there’s any way to self-administer.

He’s startled out of his semi-gloomy thoughts by a flicker of movement outside the car window. He straightens and blinks, squints to try to make out the shape in the darkness. He scans along the ground, roughly at shin height, for any sign of the gnomes he hopes will make an appearance.

He sees nothing.

He takes a deep breath, sighs, and acknowledges that it’s probably time to step out of his jeep if he wants to have this damn thing dealt with by morning.

This part in the series of misadventures that qualifies as his life had started nearly two weeks back and, things being as they were, that is long enough for him to have become twitchy and nervous and _more_ than eager to get this over with.

With the help of his dad, a fair bit of tenacious googling, and finally a few crime scene photos from the report of the “disturbed earth” that had come in last Tuesday, it hadn’t been too hard to conclude that this latest terror to haunt Beacon Hills was gnomes.

A less than pleasant surprise, though, had been when he’d realized just how many different types of gnomes there were. He’d known there was variety, sure, but he’d thought there was, like, three? A forest gnome, a mountain gnome, and maybe something like a dessert gnome or some shit? Nope. _Such_ a hard nope. _Hundreds._ Literally _hundreds_ of gnomes – whole _books,_ just on _gnomes_.

His research had gone on for about three times as long as he’d expected.

And he’d learned more about gnomes that he’d ever wished to know.

For example, he now knows that there is actually a measure of truth behind this whole Garden Santa type business. Harmless, small creatures – even by gnomish standards – that burrowed beneath buildings and fed on mice and other little critters. The ground above their tunnels was said to be especially fertile, grass growing lush and fast.

And was that what came to Beacon Hills, hm?

No.

No, of course it’s fucking not.

The crime scene photos that his dad had so thoughtfully “forgotten” out on the kitchen table for Stiles to photograph hadn’t left very much room for doubt, once he’d finally managed to come across the right book. They had shown how the earth had been disturbed – lines of brown on otherwise green grounds – in ridiculously precise designs. The circles, each roughly 45 feet in diameter, bordered on one another. They were made up of swirling patterns, almost Celtic-looking – and the exact same design had been reproduced in the book he’d found. 

They were called _Fogak Burgonya_ _–_ apparently “teeth potato” if translated literally from the original Hungarian – and pretty much unequivocally, irredeemably, _sucked._ The weird swirly circles were the trademark of their burrows, filling the ground with an ancient magic that the book had informed Stiles - without any sugarcoating what-so-ever - granted the little shits complete invulnerability to anything and everything. Great news for the lone Stiles, looking to get some gnome-extermination going.  

Not.

Oh, and there had been this one other thing that the books had said: _They fucking ate babies._

Once he’d learned _that_ little piece of information there hadn’t exactly been any time to lose.

The problem he’d immediately been faced with, though, was that he’d have to lure the impervious little child-snatchers away somewhere to be able to deal with them – and it wasn’t like anything from their usual diet was acceptable to use as bait.

The answer had come to him when he, in desperation, had been combing through his dad’s case files. Three kittens, four calves, two lambs, and a puppy has gone missing, just during the past couple of weeks.

And so, Stiles had forsaken the last claims he’d had to being a decent human being and used his magic to kidnap two baby rats from their nest.

He’d built them a new one, from twigs and leaves and grass, because the ground just looked so horribly cold when he’d put them down on it.

That had been hours ago, though, and the night is darker now, colder.

Throwing at last look at his surroundings from within the moderate safety of his Jeep, he takes a deep breath. Then he pulls the car door open and heads towards the haphazard little nest in the middle of the clearing.

The moon hangs high and full in the sky, so he knows that the others must be around in the forest somewhere. He hasn’t heard them, though; not a howl, not the breaking of a branch. He knows that they can be quiet when they want to be, but the whole forest seems to be deathly still this night.

At least the part where Stiles is.

He’s just a couple of feet away when the tiny little squeaks from the pups reach his ears. It’s faint and miserable and tears at his heart.

He stops and looks around him, trying to spot even the slightest hint in the darkness. He sees nothing, of course. Stiles always sees nothing. Because he’s weak and human like that. For the eight-hundred and ninety-seventh time this week, he wishes that one of the werewolves would deign to come with him.

But wishes do him no good, and the night remains quiet.

Save the pitiful noises coming from the innocent little baby mice.

He’s been here too long. The gnomes should have been here by now, should have been able to _smell the baby on the air,_ or whatever Stiles’ shaky translation had said.

It’s cold enough that he can see his breath on the air as he exhales. He pulls the sleeves of his flannel down over his hands, mindful not to nick himself with the machete he’s holding. He glances at the mice again. If _he’s_ cold, who is clothed and has been sitting in his car, what must the little babies be feeling? They are not even old enough to have started growing in their fur properly yet.

And Stiles keeps catching himself hoping that maybe nothing will come, that the gnomes will turn up their nose at the mice. But, then, what would that mean? That they’re out elsewhere, snatching pets from people’s homes? Stealing _newborns_ from their _cribs_?

Not that _any of it_ fucking matters, because the gnomes aren’t _here._ It doesn’t _matter_ what Stiles was willing to sacrifice, because he’s _failed._

A frustrated little half-scream escapes him and he slashes the machete through the air.

He shouldn’t have wasted the night here! He should have checked the records for who had given birth recently, which families near the area had children, should have had his dad make up a warning to keep them all inside.

If someone, _anyone,_ has been taken, it’s all _his_ -…

He swallows and stomps over to the nest, sheathing his machete as he goes. When he reaches the little bundle, he crouches down and picks up the tiny mice. He cradles them carefully in his hands and holds them close to his chest. They feel colder now than when he took them from their mother, but they’re still pretty warm and are still making noises, so he figures it can’t be that bad.

He stands, mumbling his apologies to them, promises that they’ll be okay and that they are going home. As he starts walking towards the car, he wonders if he should maybe magic his hands warmer to make the mice more comfortable or if that would somehow be harmful to them.

And then he sees it.

Through a bush, not even four feet from the front tire of his jeep, shines the blue eyes of a _Fogak Burgonya._

He freezes, mid-step.

He’d thought that they’d maybe look comical with their big blue eyes. That it’d look innocent, somehow.

It doesn’t.

It doesn’t at all.

He staggers backward, and more eyes flicker into sight. One pair after the other, like flashlights being turned on, and it’s just not in front of him now. It’s like fire spreading on gasoline, catching and lighting in a flurry.

And Stiles is surrounded.

“This isn't what was supposed to happen,” he tells the mice.

His shirt has a pocket just over his heart, and he puts the mice in it. With his hands free, he draws the machete again.

The _Fogak Burgonya_ aren’t particularly hard to kill, supposedly. Nothing specific needed, anything will do. Outside their territory, though, obviously, and their skin is said to be rather tough.

And as Stiles is running through the information in his mind, combing through everything he knows and has read, he realizes something.

It had been late when he’d sat with the translation. He’d already gone through about a dozen or so species of gnomes that day, and when he’d gotten to work on the _Fogak Burgonya_ it had already been several days since their burrow had been found. Stiles had felt that passage of time keenly, and he’d gone through the process of translating as fast as he possibly could. No one had been there to check his work.

He realizes that the gnomes don’t at all feed on children.

They feed on _youth._

“Fuck,” he says, as he is faced with the reality that he’s part of the menu.

And then a gnome snarls, high-pitched and almost screaming, and launches at him. Stiles dodges, swings his blade as the small creature flies past. He hits, but the skin _is_ tough, like rough and pebbled leather, and the machete bounces off. It’s back on its feet so impossibly fast that Stiles can hardly see it move, and then it bares its horrifyingly spiky fangs at him.

And Stiles can _really_ tell why they’re called teeth potatoes.

Then he screams, because one of the little fuckers has gotten its razor-sharp chompers sunk into his leg. He flails, swings his knife, and the creature flies off. Stiles twists around, panting, determined not to be caught unawares again.

They growl at him, surprisingly deep for something of their stature, and their eyes shine bright. The latter part is to Stiles advantage, at least, even though its creepy as all hell, because he’d hardly be able to see them otherwise. The tallest among them are maybe two feet and all of them are covered in dirt. Or maybe that’s just the color of their skin, uneven and patchy.

There’s at least thirty of them. They’ve cut off his way to his jeep, and the circle they’ve formed around him is steadily growing smaller. Stiles' heart is beating rabbit-quick in his chest and he wonders if it’s bothering the mice.

“Come on!” he yells when nothing happens for too long. “Are you just gonna stand there?!”

It’s not the best taunt he’s ever managed, but it’s enough. The snarls grow loud and four of the gnomes launch at him at once. He spins, manages to knock three of them away, grabs the fourth just as it’s about to bite down in his forearm and throws it away.

After that… everything is chaos.

Stiles slashes and twists and pulls on his magic to throw fireballs. But the creatures are too small and too many, and it’s like fighting a whirlwind of razor blades. Every twist and turn seem to cut him and his whole body is burning with the sting from their teeth.

One bites down hard on his shoulder and when Stiles screams this time, it is tinged with fear.

He’s taken down four, maybe five, of the gnomes.

He isn’t going to make it.

They’re going to kill him.

His scream twists into a roar, and his hands are flaming when he grabs the _Fogak Burgonya_ hanging from his shoulder. It wails as he throws it into a group of its friends.

They don’t seem to like the fire, and when he manages to land a solid hit with it, they die. But Stiles’ magic is doing that tingly thing in the pit of his stomach that means he doesn’t have much of it left.

_I thought I would at least be able to save the mice,_ Stiles thinks.

But they’re on him now, the ring around him drawn tight, all of them. Stiles tries to kick at them, but the moment he does the others rush forwards and descend on his legs.

Then an ear-splitting roar sounds through the clearing. As Stiles goes down, he sees Derek leap through the bushes, fully shifted into that black beast of a wolf of his.

And then there’s chaos. Most of the gnomes abandon Stiles to deal with the clearly greater threat that Derek poses, and he bites and snarls and kicks at them, scratching through their hide far more effectively than Stiles could with his knife. And then the betas join in, every single one of them, and moments later the arrows raining down herald Allison’s arrival.

Stiles stays on the ground, drags himself away from the worst of it on his elbows, rolling to his back and slashing at anything that comes near. He’s too exhausted to do anything but try to keep out of the way, to survive.

And then, barely minutes after his arrival, Derek kills the last of the gnomes with a vicious shake of his head, and the clearing falls quiet.

Stiles lets out a heavy exhale and his head falls to the ground.

He survived.

He places his hand gently over his breast pocket. After a few, absolutely heart-wrenching, moments he can finally feel the mice moving about.

_Thank god._

He closes his eyes and swallows.

The sounds of the pack moving around a couple of yards away from him seem so strange that he’d almost think that he was hallucinating. Except, if they hadn’t come, he wouldn’t have been in a state to hallucinate; wouldn’t have been in a state to do _anything_.

“Stiles.”

Stiles’ heart leaps. In fear or in joy or in surprise, he doesn’t know, but Derek is _talking to him._ And that hasn’t happened in so long that Stiles has actually forgotten a bit what he sounds like, how he says his name.

His eyes fly open. He props himself up on his arm, and stares.

The pack’s all back to human. Derek’s found pants somewhere – the backpack that stands open at Allison’s feet seems a likely guess – and the others are twisting and turning to look at the scrapes they’ve gotten. Except for Scott, who’s so completely absorbed by the gash down Allison’s arm to bother about the blood smeared on his own back.

And then Derek’s suddenly right in front of him, picking him straight off the ground by his collar and slamming his back against the car.

“ _What the hell is wrong with you?”_ Derek spits in Stiles’ face.

And any relief, any joy, any _hope_ that Stiles might have felt withers and dies.

He twists his face away from Derek, grits his teeth.

Derek slams him back against the car again. “ _What the fuck were you thinking?!”_

Stiles might actually throw up. He feels too hot, like his body parts aren’t quite attached, like all of his insides are suddenly liquid and there’s a maelstrom opening in his gut.

His hand flies up to cup around the mice in his breast pocket, trying to spare them, at least, from Derek’s wrath.

“Derek…” it’s Scott, sounding mildly chiding.

“You know I’m right, Scott,” Derek snaps, eyes red. “Go take care of Allison.”

Scott hesitates for a second, looking at Stiles. And then he leaves, arm gently around Allison’s shoulders.

And Stiles breathes in. Breathes out. Very carefully, pushing past the knot in his throat.

“ _You_ did that, Stiles,” Derek spits, pushing closer. “It’s _your_ fault that they’re hurt.”

Stiles wants to tell him that he didn’t _ask_ to be rescued, that they managed to crash the party all on their own, but he can’t quite make his mouth form words.

“What if it had been worse?” Derek demands, ruthless. “What if someone had _died?”_

Stiles _is not_ going to cry in front of Derek. He _isn’t._

“This isn’t going to happen again,” Derek says, quiet and threatening. “Do you understand, Stiles? This is _never_ going to happen again.”

And oh, god, does Stiles wish that he could snark back. That he could tell Derek that he hadn’t counted on it this time, thanks, and that he’s been doing perfectly fine without them for a good long while now.

But he can’t.

He doesn’t even dare open his mouth for fear that sobs will come slipping out.

Derek is evidently not pleased by his silence.

“Do you understand!?” he says, shaking Stiles. His fingers are closed around where one of the gnomes had sunk its teeth in and, _god,_ it hurts. “Tell me, Stiles!”

Stiles nods.

Derek’s hands ease off enough that Stiles can wrench out of their grip completely. Derek lets him, because of course Stiles couldn’t manage to get anywhere if Derek didn’t _let him._

He stomps around his car and pulls the door open.

“Stiles…” Erica says, but Stiles slams the car shut before she can get anywhere with it.

He turns the key in the ignition and turns up the radio as far as it will go; anything to drown out whatever they might be getting from his bloody treacherous body right now. It’s some stupid fucking pop-song and, _fuck,_ Stiles can’t even manage to get the damned _exit_ right. He blinks away the wetness in his eyes, puts the jeep in gear, and tears out of the clearing. 

Leaving the wolves standing staring in silent judgment behind him.


	3. Chapter 3

# III

He doesn’t cry at all during the drive back, and he’s pretty fucking proud of that.

When he puts the mice back down, having managed to find the nest where he’d first picked them up, they are well enough that they greet their mother with excitement. And he’s pretty fucking proud of that too.

After that, though, everything goes to shit.

He goes back around to the front of the house and is reaching for the handle when the door suddenly opens.

“Stiles,” his father says, clearly startled to find him right outside. He’s backlit by the yellowish light of the hallway, catching and glittering on the metal details on his uniform, and it allows Stiles to see the surprise morphing into concern on his face. “What happened to you?”

Stiles looks down at himself.

His flannel button-up is dirty and matted with blood. In places, the fabric is torn open and through the gaps perfect little half-moons are painted in angry red over his skin. His jeans, too, are scratched, but have generally held up better. Along his left calf, though, where the first gnome had bitten him, the fabric is clinging wetly to his skin.

When he shifts guiltily under his father’s gaze, he can feel the drying blood pulling at the hairs on his leg and the wounds throb like a threat.

“The gnomes are gone?” he tries, shrugging slightly and forcing a smile.

His father’s eyebrows pull together.

“No,” he says, grasping Stiles and pulling him gently inside. “I meant, are you okay?”

Stiles feels slightly claustrophobic as the door clicks shut beside him.

He shrugs. “I’m fine. It’s mostly gnome-blood.”

His dad does not look particularly calmed by the assurance. “Are those _teeth marks_ on your arm?”

Stiles glances at where his dad’s looking.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, chuckles weakly. “Forgot about those.”

His dad looks at him, frown not easing. _Really_ looks at him. Stiles finds himself ducking his head under his gaze, trying to hide his face without making it immediately obvious.

It feels like his father’s eyes are steadily peeling back layers of him, revealing what’s underneath. And Stiles is so fucking _fragile_ now, worn so thin, that he can’t endure much peeling without-… without _breaking._

He swallows. Tries to draw even breaths.

“Stiles…” his dad says quietly, placing both hands carefully on Stiles’ shoulders. “Tell me what’s wrong?”

Stiles stops breathing.

_What the hell is wrong with you?_

For a moment Stiles thinks he can deal with it. Can keep everything pushed down. He opens his mouth to offer his dad a reassuring joke, but what bubbles up instead is:

“I just wish they _liked_ me, Dad.”

It’s so true, so _blindingly humiliating_ , that he squeezes his eyes shut the moment the words are past his lips. It feels like his heart is trying to choke him, his voice is just a rough mess, and the tears are stinging like fire behind his eyes.

For a moment he is alone in the darkness, pinned between the hot points where his dad’s palms are touching his shoulders. Then his father’s arms wrap around him.

It’s warm and safe and _perfect_ , and everything smells like his dad and, for a split-second, Stiles gets to fall into the bliss of being a child again. Gets to believe that his dad is here now and that means that everything is going to be okay.

Then a sob rocks his body.

Stiles presses his face into his dad's uniform and tries to make it soak up the tears, hide the evidence of it.

“ _Stiles_ …” his dad says, quiet and sad, combing his fingers through his hair.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters into the rough fabric. “I’m _sorry_. I didn’t mean to-…”

He hiccoughs, chokes on a sob before he can finish, but it’s true. He _didn’t_ mean to. Didn’t want to burden his father with this stupid thing, didn’t want him to _worry_ , but-… but maybe, even now, he’s keeping too much from his dad. Maybe it was only a matter of time before the dam burst.

Especially when he’s got no one else to talk to.

“Don’t apologize,” his father says, and now a note of anguish has crept into his voice. “God, Stiles, what the hell are you apologizing for?”

Stiles just shakes his head, tries to bury his face completely in his dad’s shoulder. The sounds he’s making feels almost disconnected from him, from anything within his control or consciousness. His body _hurts;_ his ribs can’t seem to expand enough to accommodate his desperate breaths, his stomach is just a twisted-up ball of pain, and every inhale seems to cut and claw its way down his throat.

“I’m not- I don’t…” He’s forced to stop by great hulking breaths, in, in, _in,_ until he has to sob it all out.

_Fuck._

He’s a mess.

“Shh, Stiles…” His dad’s arms squeeze around him, and Stiles can hear the creeping helplessness in his voice now, that very clear tell his father has always had that he feels in over his head and can’t think of a solution to offer. “Just-… Breathe. It’s- you’re okay.”

Stiles hadn’t actually even considered the possibility of a panic attack right now. Maybe his dad thinks its oncoming though. Or, maybe, he simply isn’t equipped to handle his grown-ass son crying on his shoulder and is grasping for any tools at his disposal.

For some reason, that thought wrings a shaking laugh from him.

That, or it’s the suggestion that Stiles is anywhere close to okay.

Whatever it may be, it seems to reassure his dad slightly though, because his voice is just the littlest bit more steady when he asks: “Do I need to shoot anyone?”

Stiles snorts, even through the tears.

Maybe he should stay in the moment, maybe he should let his feelings run their course, maybe he should take the time to explore his emotions… but he doesn’t want to. He grabs the lifeline his father has thrown him – the very same he is so used to reaching for on his own: humor – and clings to it desperately. Drags himself up and away from the pit of misery he’s stumbled into.

“Nah,” he manages, between slightly trembling breaths. “Just promise to have my back if I ever decide to."

His father smiles slightly, but his voice carries a gravity that doesn’t match the context: “Always, Stiles.”

It’s almost enough to send him right back into the blackened hole he just crawled out of, but somehow he manages to keep it together. To push the torrent of miserable thoughts into a little box and stomp on it.

He withdraws from his dad’s embrace and wipes his face roughly with both hands.

“Well,” he says, trying for levity. “That was horribly embarrassing.”

His father’s hands squeeze over his shoulders, and this time the corners of his mouth twitch down instead of up.

“ _Stiles…”_ he says, and there is a despondency in his voice that makes Stiles’ conscience twinge. “There’s nothing you should feel embarrassed to talk to me about.”

It’s getting hard to breathe again. He can’t take kindness now. It’s going to break him. It’s going to reduce him to a sobbing pile on the hallway floor and then he’ll never move again.

“Except sex, right?” Stiles says quickly, sending prayers to all the beings above for his father to stop.

Just stop.

“Son,” his dad says, sighing. “If your friends don’t like you-“

A noise of protest escapes from Stiles’ throat, somewhere between a whine and a sob.

“ _If your friends don’t like you,”_ his father says, carrying on, “which I very much doubt, I hope that you realize that it's your _friends_ that there’s something wrong with, not you."

Stiles’ throat clogs back up, to the point of pain. An ache that makes his whole mouth feel strange and ill-fitting, like his jaw suddenly no longer fits right on his face.

It's a little gratifying, in a soul-destroying kind of way, that his dad doesn't immediately mention Scott; that means that he’s noticed his absence, too.

He covers his face with his hands and breathes until he’s sure he’s not going to turning into a human fountain again. When he looks back up he plasters a smile on.

“You _have_ to say shit like that, dad,” he says. “Not that I don’t appreciate the vote of confidence.”

His dad’s eyebrows pull together. “I’m not just _saying_ that, Stiles, you-“

“Yeah, yeah.” Stiles waves the platitudes away. “I’m not… maybe some other time.”

His dad falls quiet, but there’s a heaviness to the way his eyes are resting on Stiles that makes his skin crawl.

“God,” he says, stepping away from the hands on his shoulders. “what does a poor teenager have to do to get to mope in peace around here?"

His father’s serious face doesn’t budge.

“I can leave you alone, if that’s what you want, Stiles,” he says. “But don’t think for a moment that you need to be.”

Stiles leans back against the wall, squeezes his eyes shut.

And his father just keeps going: “You are more important than my work, Stiles. You’re more important than _anything_ else. And you aren’t creating any trouble for me if you want a bit of company tonight.”

It’s simultaneously the best and worst thing his dad could have said. Both perfect and heart-wrenching. It’s _exactly_ what Stiles wants to hear, but despite that – _because_ of that, maybe – he can’t bring himself to believe it. Can’t quite manage to trust that he’d ever be someone’s priority.

It sets off another sharp jab of guilt, because his father is _wonderful, perfect,_ and doesn’t deserve to be doubted. Doesn’t deserve to have Stiles look at his assurances with disbelief.

“No, dad, I-…” Stiles' throat is still so thick that it feels like he’s swallowed a fucking _rock,_ that he’s having trouble pushing words and air through. “I think… I think I’d just like to take a shower and- and maybe sleep for a couple of hours.”

He has to look down again, but he can feel his dad’s searching look nevertheless.

It lasts for a few, long, tense moments.

“Then you shower, and you sleep,” his father says. “But that doesn’t mean that I have to go anywhere.”

“ _Dad-“_

“I’m serious, Stiles,” his father says.

Stiles swallows. “So am I.”

His father crosses his arms over his chest.

“Go out there,” Stiles insists, gesturing weakly towards the door. “Make sure there’s no more of those gnomes around. Protect the innocent, defend the weak.”

Years of successful manipulation does not let Stiles miss the small faltering of his father’s resolve at those last few words, and he knows in that moment that he will get his way.

It takes almost ten minutes and an endless stream of Stiles’ reassurances but, sure enough, his father eventually bends to his will and Stiles manages to push him through the door.

“I’ll have my phone on all night,” his dad says, for the third time at least. “And you can call me if you-… Call me for _any_ reason, okay Stiles?”

The night air is cool and refreshing on Stiles’ warm and tear-stained face, and he smiles a little as he watches his father twirl the keys to the cruiser in his hand.

“I promise,” Stiles says.

His dad stares at him for a few seconds before he nods. “Good. I love you, son.”

Stiles smiles again. “I love you too, dad.”

They stand, only looking at one another, for a few seconds. Then his father’s hand falls heavy and warm on his shoulder. Then he walks away, the hum of the engine breaks the quiet of the night, and Stiles watches the red of the taillights disappear down the street.

He stands outside and just breathes for a moment, looks up at the stars peeking out between the clouds.

Then he steps inside and closes the door.

Heads for his room.

He walks slowly up the stairs. Step, by step, by step, heaving himself along with the help of the railing. He can really feel the place where the goblin sank its teeth in his leg now, throbbing slightly each time he puts his foot down, but it's distant. Grounding, almost, rather than painful.

Gives him something to think about other than the oppressive quiet.  

Other than the fact that he isn’t as okay with being alone as he had claimed.

He pushes the door open and doesn’t even bother turning on the light. He twists out of his torn plaid and throws it in the vague direction of his dresser. The movement makes the cuts on his arms twinge and for the briefest moment he considers going to the bathroom to clean the wounds, but he’s _so fucking tired._ Any energy he might have had left after his day – his week, his _month –_ has been wrung out of him by the crying. The threat of a headache throbs beneath his temples and he just hopes that he can manage to fall asleep before the full force of it is upon him.

Then suddenly red flashes in the darkness.


	4. Chapter 4

# IV

Stiles feels like he’s been dropped off a cliff.

His stomach swoops, huge and nauseating. His whole body burns, flares, and then the flush leaves behind a clammy chill.

His hand finds the light-switch.

Derek blinks into the sudden brightness.

“How long have you been up here?”

There’s a twist of Derek’s mouth that is a more eloquent answer than any words he could have offered.

For all Stiles has been through, he hasn’t ever felt so close to dying as he does in that moment. There might not be any obvious cause, no _real_ mortal peril, but at the same time he can’t understand how someone can feel so unbearably awful as he does now and not simply _cease_.

“Get out,” he says, voice startlingly blank.

Derek’s jaw works. Then he swallows. “No.”

Stiles feels magic prickle under his skin, from some deep well inside him that he’ll probably never be able to consciously access. “I wasn’t asking.”

Derek doesn’t say anything. Just looks at Stiles with his red eyes, chest rising and falling with his deep breaths.

And suddenly Stiles realizes that he can’t remember the last time Derek was in his room. Used to be that he could hardly go a full week without his window sliding open for one reason or another, but now…

The magic that has risen unbidden beneath his skin fizzles out. His shoulders fall and he presses his thumb and forefinger against his eyes; a vain attempt to physically push away the moisture from them.

“What do you want?” he asks, removing his hand so that he can glare.

Derek is still standing over by the corner, just as he had been when Stiles closed his eyes. He just stares at him, face entirely unreadable.

Stiles’ skin crawls.

“ _Why_ did you even come here?” Stiles snaps, drawing on anger to drown out the shame and despondency. “To yell at me some more, huh? Make sure I understand just how _much_ of an _idiot_ I am?”

He says it because… _because._ Because it feels good to throw out some accusations in anger.

But it backfires horribly, and Derek’s eyes fall to the floor and his mouth twitches down and- and-…

“You did,” Stiles breathes, staggered by the realization. “You did, you actually-…”

He breaks off, has to let out a mirthless laugh, can’t stop staring at Derek’s resolutely averted eyes.

_Then again, why not?_

The thought stops him cold, disbelieving smile slipping from his lips.

Why not, since all he ever seems to be to Derek is a liability? Why wouldn’t he come and yell some more at Stiles for risking the lives of those that _actually_ matter?

“Well, go ahead, then,” Stiles says. “I’m all ears.”

Derek’s eyes flick back up to his, and they’ve finally stopped burning red. “What?”

“Yell at me,” Stiles says, meeting Derek’s gaze evenly.

Derek’s eyebrows pull together. “Stiles, I-… I can’t-…”

“Can’t yell at me while I’m crying?” Stiles says and does his best to ignore the flare in his cheeks. “Sorry to inconvenience you. Would you like to reschedule?”

“ _Stiles.”_

And there it is. Derek’s patented _I-hate-you-for-existing_ way of spitting out his name.

He just wants to be cold, aloof, shield whatever shreds of his dignity that might remain. But apparently that’s too much to ask, and his breath hitches as his throat squeezes shut again.

“I _heard_ you,” Derek continues, and that’s just about the last thing Stiles wants to hear. “What you said.”

It’s bad enough that his dad heard it.

“Stiles,” Derek says again. “Why-“

“No,” Stiles interrupts, finally finding his voice. “ _No._ You can yell at me, you can complain, you can- can… you _cannot_ bring _that_ up. Do what you came here to do. You weren’t supposed to- _no one_ was supposed to hear that.”

Stiles’ heart beats so heavy and hard in his chest that _he_ can hear it, can feel the pulsing of it in his face and fingertips. What it must sound like to Derek.

Derek takes a step closer.

“You really meant it,” he says, he _insists_. “I could hear-... Why would you-… _Why?”_

There’s something so profoundly unfair about the question that Stiles hardly knows where to begin answering it. That it leaves him stuttering and flailing. 

“I talk to my dad, okay!” he exclaims finally, because that seems like the least embarrassing part. “Apparently that’s a thing that’s happening now! Apparently I can’t keep myself from _fucking_ -…”

Stiles cuts himself off, sucks the words about to spill out back in with a gulping breath. He’s winded, all of a sudden, though he can’t tell why.

“Look,” he says. “I’m sorry you got some of my messy emotions on you in the explosion, but let me reiterate: _you were not supposed to hear that._ You _eavesdropped,_ dude, you can’t-“

“Stiles.”

Derek says his name quietly, now, but it’s somehow enough to silence the outpour of words anyway.

But when Stiles stares at him – and goddamnit, he can feel the wordless plea his whole body is positively _exuding_ – Derek looks suddenly uncomfortable. The anger, the pity, the confusion – all of it drains away, and Derek shuffles awkwardly from foot to foot.

And then he says:

“They _do_ like you.”

And wow.

Just _wow_.

There’s so much wrong with that – the obvious platitude, the choice of pronoun, the _abject_ _dishonesty –_ that Stiles can’t help but laugh.  

“Mistake on my part, clearly – mustn’t let my ego become so fragile in the future,” he says, plastering on a sardonic grin before turning his back to Derek. He walks over to his desk, begins shuffling books around just to have something to occupy his hands and eyes with. “I’m feeling _so_ much better after your heartfelt and completely genuine reassurance; please do feel free to resume your regularly scheduled verbal lashing, and then get the _fuck_ out of here.”

“ _Stiles,”_ Derek says, and he really doesn’t seem to have _anything_ in the way of patience to show to him. “I’m not lying.”

Stiles doesn’t look up from his books.

“It doesn’t matter, Derek. I clearly deserve better. And it’s not like I’m going to be alone forever because of you guys being unable to recognize awesome when you see it, is it?”

There’s a beat of absolute silence following his words that tells him he’s fucked up. But his face hurts and his nose is running and his whole body is burning steadily with embarrassment and so it’s not until Derek speaks that he remembers how:

“I can hear your heart,” he says, sounding bewildered. “You’re-… _lying_. You-…?”  

Stiles stills.

Closes his eyes.

Betrayed by his fucking heart - isn’t that the theme of his goddamn life? For the briefest of moments, he considers slamming the drawer of his desk open, pulling out the knife he knows lays there, and stabbing it into the treacherous piece-of-shit muscle.

_Try listening to **this** , why don’t you? _

Instead he just swallows, spits: “Fuck off.”

“Stiles, I-“

“No. _Fuck you_ , Derek!” He spins around, points an angry finger at Derek. “ _You_ don’t care about me, you don’t get to come here and tell me what I should and shouldn’t feel! You don’t have the-“

“I’m not _telling_ you how to feel!” Derek protests. “I’m just-“

“You’re _not_? Because is sure as _fuck_ feels like it!”

“I’m just trying to _understand_!”

Stiles scoffs. “Understand _what the hell is wrong with me_ , yeah, you said before.”

Derek actually looks stricken. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

Stiles smiles mirthlessly and shakes his head. “Don’t think there’s a whole lot of different ways _to_ mean it, dude.”

“I didn’t know you would take it like _this!”_

Stiles stares at him with wide eyes.

“Holy fuck, dude,” he breathes. “You’re making this out to be _my fault?”_

“No! Stiles, I-“

“You absolute _asshole!”_ Stiles exclaims. “You can ignore me, shut me out, leave me to deal with all your shit, _whatever!_ But you have to _own up to it_ , man! Not a _single one_ of you has spoken with me outside of school for more than a _month_! And _in_ school they barely even fucking nod to me in the corridors! _You_ haven’t spoken to me _at all,_ for way longer! There’s only _one_ fucking interpretation to make there!”

“Stiles…”

“I _get_ that I’m not that great, okay?” Stiles says, ignoring whatever Derek is trying to say – how his own voice is starting to break. “I _know_ that I’m not anyone’s top choice and, yeah, sure, fuck it, I _do_ wish that they liked me – I guess I’m just pathetic like that – but that does _not_ mean-“

“ _Stiles!”_

“ _That does not mean,”_ he persists, speaking louder to counteract the fact that his words have gone a bit wobbly, “that I’m about to just _stand_ here and let you say _whatever_ to me! I’m not-!”

_“I told them to stay away!”_

Stiles stares.

His heartbeat is loud in the silence that follows.

He feels a little bit like he’s suddenly gone all empty inside. Like Derek’s words are bouncing around freely inside him, reverberating against the edges of his being.

He swallows.

“You told them to stay away.” His voice is oddly flat as he repeats the words.

“Yes,” Derek says, squaring his shoulders a little bit. “The others didn’t-“

"You _told_ them to stay away," Stiles says again, interrupting, voice now gone high with incredulity.

A laugh slips out of him. Because that's actually _worse_ than what he was expecting. Not just boredom or- or absent-mindedness. Actual, _deliberate_ avoidance. He realizes then and there that he has, impossibly, held on to some small measure of hope through it all. He realizes it because he feels it wither and die; boredom might pass on its own, but calculated avoidance… not so much.

Derek is standing too close now, and Stiles is starting to feel claustrophobic. He walks in a wide arch around the werewolf – and god, fuck, the pain in his leg makes him hobble slightly, and Stiles is probably doomed to never make a dignified retreat in his life – far enough that he is out of reach. He ends up over by the bed, as far away as he can get, and there’s so many emotions swirling inside that his skin is itching.  

He twists back around to stare at Derek.

“ _Why?”_ he asks, so profoundly confused and frustrated by it all that the small syllable hardly seems sufficient to contain it. " _Why_ would you do that? Did you think my general sucky-ness was contagious? Do I cramp your fucking _style?"_

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Derek snarls. “You don’t-“

“Did you _want_ to hurt me?” Stiles interrupts. “Is that it?”

Derek looks like Stiles has slapped him.

Except, no, if he slapped him, he wouldn’t even feel it; Stiles hasn’t ever had the power to hurt Derek.

“No!” Derek snaps. “Of course not, why would I-“

“Do you hate me?” Stiles presses, despite that his voice is hitching.

Derek stares at him. His eyes are wide and completely human. His mouth is opening and closing, but no sounds are coming out.

“ _Do you?!”_ Stiles presses angrily, voice gone sour and shrill and pathetic.

Derek flinches, turns away. His hands curl into fists at his sides and his shoulders go tight.

“That’s not-“ Derek starts, shaking his head. “I didn’t realize it’d be like _this_.”

“Like _what_?” Stiles asks sharply. “That I’d go all mopey and _sad_? You took the people I _love_ away from me, Derek! You _fucked up my life!”_

Tears burn in Stiles' eyes and blur out the world, so he doesn’t see Derek’s face go white. Doesn’t see how Derek’s hand shakes as he reaches out for the back of the computer chair. Doesn’t see him collapse into it and cover his face with his hands.

Stiles squeezes his eyes shut to push away the tears.

“This fucking _sucks,”_ he says, laughing weakly. “You told them to-… and they _agreed_ to it, just like that?”

He opens his eyes, and Derek is hunched over, but Stiles doesn’t care.

“Did you really have to _push_ them? Maybe they could have been okay with me, maybe I could have-“ he chokes on his own words, can’t continue, starts over. “Couldn’t you- whatever it was that was so- couldn’t you just have _put up with me,_ Derek _?_ ”

Oh god, Stiles can feel the tears coming again. He breathes heavily to try to push through them, but this is _Derek._ Derek who he wants more than _anyone_ to-

“Fuck.”

“Stiles, I _never_ -“

“What was it?” Stiles asks, looking up at Derek.

Derek lifts his head from his hands. “What?”

“What was it?” Stiles asks again. “That I did that was so terrible?”

Derek’s face twists and he shakes his head. “No, Stiles, it wasn’t-“

“Tell me,” Stiles demands. “Was it all the talking? That I wouldn’t just listen to your stupid orders?”

“ _It wasn’t like-“_

“Is it just that I’m not a werewolf?” Stiles pushes, and his voice is growing louder. “That I’m not as good as Allison at shooting shit? Or as good as Lydia at research? Or was it just _all_ of it!? Why was I never good en-?!“

_"I was trying to protect you_!" Derek roars.

And Stiles just kind of freezes.

All the breath goes out of him.

Derek has stood up with his outburst. The chair is spinning soundlessly, round and round, from the force of it as they stare at each other. Derek is panting and red-eyed, and Stiles still can hardly make his lungs do their job.

"That's what you're going with?" he asks, finally, and he barely recognizes his own voice. "That's- that's the _best_ you could come up with?"

"I... what?" Derek asks, deflating slightly, and there's genuine confusion there, but Stiles doesn't hear it.

He's so angry that his face feels like it’s burning, that his head is spinning with it.

"How the _fuck_ do you- After I _fucking_ -" Stiles chokes on all his emotions, loses his words in the torrent of them, but then he finally manages to spit out: "With _everything_ I've been doing, how could you _possibly_ believe I would buy that fucking _bullshit_ excuse?"

Derek has the fucking _nerve_ to look offended. "What the hell are you talking about? It's not an-"

And then he breaks off, and his eyebrows pull down in confusion.

"What do you mean, with everything you have been doing? What are you talking about?"

Stiles snorts. “Do you need a fucking list?”

“Stiles, _what are you talking about?”_

“Should I catalog all of it for you, maybe? Order of appearance, alphabetically?”

“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!”

" _YOU KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!_ "  

His scream echoes in the room, rings even in his own ears.

He’s risked _everything._ Risked his academic career, risked his life, risked _leaving his father alone._ And he _won’t_ let Derek just dismiss that, won’t let him pretend that it’s nothing important. The least – the _least –_ he can do is fucking _acknowledge_ it.

But Derek doesn't flinch at the volume of his scream.

He just stares at Stiles with wide-eyed horror.

And Stiles is hit with a realization that makes his knees weak.

"You don't know."

For a moment they only stare at one another.

Then Derek shakes his head.

Stiles laughs bitterly as he staggers backwards. The back of his knees hits the edge of his bed, and he sinks down on it, shakes his head in disbelief. He'd assumed that the pack knew. That _Derek_ knew, at the very least. That the sheer number of magical creatures that came and went would at least assure a blip on Derek's radar.

But, then, nothing else Stiles did was apparently worthy of note; why would this be any different?

"What, did you think the monsters just stopped coming?" Stiles asks, darkly amused, and looks back up.

He’s glad he did, because he gets to see guilt and horror twist Derek’s features.

Stiles snort’s again, something unpleasant in him glad to see someone else suffering for once. “Well, I’ll get you that list, then, since you can’t be bothered to keep an eye on your own territory.”

And that’s crossing a line – Stiles knows it as soon as the words are out of his mouth – but Derek doesn’t say anything.

Instead, he closes his eyes. Then he brings a hand up and rubs over them. Stiles can see the claws growing on the other before Derek closes it into a hard fist.

“It wasn’t just tonight,” Derek says. “That wasn’t a one-time thing.”

Stiles snorts at the very idea. “Dude, no. What, did you think I’d just been hanging out in my room all this time?”

The hard set of Derek’s jaw answers for him, and Stiles just shakes his head in disbelief.

“The gnomes might have been the worst of them,” he says, “but not even close to the first. Eleventh, maybe? Twelfth? Depends on if you count the shifter, too, I guess.”

“A shifter?” Derek asks, eyes snapping back up. “There was a shifter _here?”_

“A succubus,” Stiles specifies, shrugging. “Right there in the preserve. Don’t understand how you could have missed her, to be honest.”

“A _succubus?”_ Derek asks, and his face is pale. “How did you- did _she-…?”_

Stiles shakes his head. “Didn’t lay a finger on anyone, far as I know. She’s long gone by now.”

The relief is very obvious on Derek’s usually expressionless face, and Stiles is a little confused for a moment. Then he remembers Kate, that Derek has more issues with consent than most, and has to push away the sympathy.

He’s _angry_ right now, dammit, he doesn’t want to feel _sorry_ for Derek.

“They’re supposed to-… How did you resist her?”

“I’m magic, remember,” Stiles says, wiggling his fingers.

The statement technically isn’t a lie – shouldn’t get picked up by Derek’s monster ears – even though the implication that it has anything to do with his imperviousness to sexy demon ladies is stretching the truth a little bit.

Derek, though, is looking at him like he doesn’t quite understand what he’s seeing. Like Stiles has suddenly gone and become someone – some _thing –_ else while he wasn’t paying attention, and now he doesn’t quite recognize him.

Then again, Derek hasn’t been paying any attention for a good long while, so maybe Stiles has.

“What else?” Derek asks.

“What?” Stiles frowns.

“What else have you fought?”

“I didn’t fight the succubus,” he protests. “I just talked with her a bit. Same with the coven of witches that tried to settle down here a month or so ago.”

“But you _have_ fought?” Derek persists.

“Yeah, sure.” Stiles shrugs. “A slime monster a few weeks back. A goblin that decided that the vents in school was a great place to live. The omega that came through in the beginning of last month – if you want to call that a fight. The pixies, a ghoul, something called a Blemmyes, a-“

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Derek interrupts. “Why didn’t you ever ask for _help_?”

“Why didn’t I-“ Stiles cuts himself off, squeezes his eyes shut in sheer frustration.

Then he reaches for his cell. He ignores Derek’s furrowed brow look and unlocks it, taps open the texting app.

“Have something to talk about,” he reads aloud. “Can I come over? Your reply: _No_.”

He scrolls further up, picks a few out at random as he goes.

“Do you know what Erica and Boyd are up to? Can’t get a hold of them. _No_. Need to see the pack, could you call them? _No_. Might need back-up by the lacrosse field, you free? And look at that, what a surprise, you said _no_!”

He shuts off the screen and looks up at Derek.

“I could open up the call logs, too, but frankly that would just make me look pathetic.”

Derek, infuriatingly, is staring at him with wide eyes.

“Oh, no, _come on,”_ Stiles protests. “You _answered_ the fucking texts, Derek, you can’t pretend that this comes like some sort of surprise to you.”

Derek shakes his head. “I didn’t…”

“You didn’t, what?”

Derek swallows.

“I thought you were just…” he shrugs awkwardly.

“What?” Stiles asks, scoffing. “Asking to hang?”

Derek’s face goes abruptly blank in a way that’s somehow very telling.

“What the hell, Derek?” Stiles stares at him in disbelief. “When have I _ever_ asked to hang out with _you?”_

Derek’s jaw works and he stares mutely away.

“I asked for _backup!”_ Stiles says, incredulous. “Explicitly!”

Again, Derek shrugs his shoulders.

“Oh my god,” Stiles says, staring. “Oh my god.”

Derek’s shoulders go tight.

“You’re an idiot,” Stiles declares.

For a moment, Stiles almost thinks he sees hurt flash over Derek’s features. In the next moment, though, Derek’s eyes flash literal red with fury, and Stiles is forced to conclude that he must have been seeing things.

“ _I’m_ an idiot?” Derek says, and it’s nearly a growl. He moves forward towards Stiles and the claws are coming out on his hands as he gestures sharply. “ _I’m_ the idiot, when _you,_ in response to a lack of back-up, decide to go out _alone_?”

“What the hell was I supposed to do?!”

“Stay at _home_ , Stiles!” Derek bellows. “The whole fucking _point_ of _-!“_

“Let me fucking reiterate: people were _dying_!” Stiles interrupts, getting to his feet. “What the fuck was I supposed to do about that!?”

“ _It’s not your fucking responsibility!”_

Stiles squeezes his jaw shut so tight that he can feel his teeth grind.

“I _made_ it my responsibility.”

Derek stares at him. There’s a look in his eyes that seems to suggest that he’s caught somewhere between incredulity and a desperate desire to punch Stiles in the face.

“ _Why_ _?”_

Stiles opens his mouth, but he doesn’t have an answer. So he closes it again. There hasn’t been any thought, no motivation. It hasn’t ever felt like a _choice_ in the first place. It’s just something that is: the sky is blue, the grass is green, and Stiles will protect Beacon Hills until the day he dies.

He stares at Derek.

The silence grows long.

“It's like Spider-Man, isn't it?" Stiles says, eventually, and he thought to make it sort of a joke but somehow it comes out sounding far too genuine. “With great power comes great responsibility and all that."

Derek looks at him like he’s gone insane.

“You don’t _have_ any powers, Stiles.”

Stiles focuses on breathing deeply through his nose.

Stiles has fucking _magic,_ thank you very much, even if the fucking _canis ducheus_ doesn’t acknowledge it as anything special. He _isn’t_ useless. He fucking _isn’t._

_Fuck._

“I know,” he says, eyes stinging almost unbearably from the effort of keeping the tears at bay. “I _know,_ okay? I know that I’m just the squishy human that keeps getting in the way. But _dying people,_ Derek, okay? I can’t just- just do _nothing_ to fix that!”

“ _Yes you can_!” Derek screams, as though this is his whole fucking point. “That’s _exactly_ what you’re fucking _supposed_ to do! You’re supposed to leave it _alone_! You’re supposed to get the hell out of the way and let _us_ deal with it!”

“Because that’s all I’m good for, huh?!” Stiles shoots back, slightly impressed with the volume he achieves despite the figurative iron fist crushing his windpipe. “Because all I can do is-!”

“BECAUSE YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE WITH A _CHOICE_!” Derek explodes.

Stiles blinks.

Derek stares at him, wide-eyed and something desperate and wild in them.

“What?”

“You don’t have to be here,” Derek says. “You don’t _have_ to stay. Not with the pack, not in Beacon Hills. You can _leave.”_

Stiles shakes his head.

“I don’t want to,” is all he can think to say, while his heart beats wildly at the thought that maybe Derek will make him.

Derek squeezes his eyes shut as though Stiles’ very existence pains him.

Then he opens them back up, steps closer with his palms facing up.

“You can go _anywhere_ , Stiles,” Derek says intently, looking at Stiles like he’s some animal that’s about to startle and run into oncoming traffic. “The others are bound to me, the land. They don’t have a choice like you do. You can _leave_.”

_Can_ Derek make him? He’s not in the pack, he shouldn’t be able to be influenced particularly by its alpha. But is that really how it works? Stiles is magic and the land has belonged to Derek’s family for ages; will he really be able to stay if Derek decides he wants him gone?

“I don’t _want_ to,” Stiles says again, because the silence is stretching out for too long and he can’t think of anything else.

Derek does not seem to get more receptive to the message with repetition.

“No- _Stiles_ ,” he says. “You don’t get it. You don’t have any _reason_ to stay.”

Stiles’ whole being revolts at that notion, and for a moment it actually feels like he’s falling over.

“Is it really that bad?” He finally manages.

Derek opens his mouth. Then closes it again, frowns.

“What?”

“I’m out of the pack, you haven’t seen me for fucking _months._ You can’t even stand being in the same goddamn _town_ as me, Derek?” There’s a curious mix of emotions swirling inside him, and he’s feeling at once furious and pathetic. “Do I fucking _smell_ or something?”

Derek looks shocked, then it quickly descends into fury.

“ _Stop_ fucking twisting my words!” he exclaims, biceps bulging as he tears at his hair. “That’s _not_ what I _said_!”

“Oh, isn’t it now?!” Stiles says, so sarcastic that he might actually strain something, but there are tears in the corners of his eyes. “This whole fucking night wasn’t a ginormous fucking declaration of just how much of a _nuisance_ you think I am?”

“ _No_!” Derek bellows, throwing out his arms. “It _wasn’t!”_

“Fine!” Stiles exclaims. “ _Fine_! Then why don’t you go ahead and _tell me_ what the fuck this is all about?!”

“ _KEEPING YOU SAFE!”_

Stiles swears he can feel a piece of him die at that moment. The tears that he’d managed to keep back before spill down his cheeks and a sob so violent that it feels like it’s trying to twist him inside out tears through his body. He swallows it down before any noise escapes him.

“Sure,” he says, voice impressively normal, twisting his whole body away so he doesn’t have to look at Derek. His leg is throbbing just from him standing on it, though, so he can’t actually walk out and make the dramatic exit one might have wished for. “Keep going with the _least_ convincing lie in fucking _history_. Let’s, for the moment, ignore the glaring flaw that I’ve been in more danger the past months than pretty much ever, _and_ _you didn’t fucking notice,_ what _possible_ fucking motivation would _you_ have for keeping _me_ safe? You haven’t exactly kept the dislike on the down-low, Derek.”

Derek is silent for a long while.

Stiles keeps his eyes firmly on the wall on the other side of his bed, focusing on his breathing.

Then Derek says, in a voice so quiet and soft that Stiles hardly recognizes it: “I don’t dislike you.”

Stiles is so startled that he forgets his silent pledge not to and looks over at Derek. Then a laugh bubbles out of him, entirely devoid of humor.

“Sure,” Stiles says. “Try again.”

“I don’t,” Derek insists.

Stiles doesn’t _have_ a fucking patience to test.

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I _don’t!”_ Derek repeats firmly.

Stiles stares at him, feels the magic prickle at his fingertips as his anger rises.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” he says, voice low and dangerous. “But fucking _cut it out.”_

“Stiles,” Derek says. “I like you.”

Stiles takes the words like a blow, flinches.

“Fuck off,” Stiles growls. “I do _not_ want your platitudes.”

“I _like_ you, _”_ Derek says, and he’s starting to sound desperate.

And Stiles doesn’t _care._ “Oh, that’s convincing, isn’t it?!”

“No, Stiles, you aren’t listening,” Derek insists, moving closer. “I _li-“_

“OF COURSE I’M NOT LISTENING!” Stiles explodes. “After _everything_ you’ve done, after everything you _haven’t_ done, how can you possibly exp-mnh!”

Derek’s kissing him.

His stubble scrapes against Stiles’ chin, along where his tears have dampened his skin, and it’s not a sensation Stiles has ever expected to feel. It’s soft, though in an entirely different way than the satiny feel of his lips, and Stiles stares at the blurry sight of Derek’s dark lashes closed against his skin.

Then it’s over.

Derek pulls back, hands still fisted in the hair on the back of Stiles’ head, and looks at Stiles like _he_ was the one who performed the surprise mouth-attack.

“What the fuck,” Stiles breathes.

Derek snatches away as if burnt.

“Is this a joke?” Stiles asks, twisting around to see if there is anyone else in the room. He’s pretty sure he’s had nightmares that went like this. “Is this a fucking _joke_?”

The repeated question is directed at Derek, and Derek doesn’t look like he knows the answer.

“… what?”

“Are you- what the fuck were you-…” Stiles trails off, shakes his head. Derek wouldn’t do this. Derek wouldn’t fucking use _this_ against him. That _can’t_ be what’s going on here.

“ _What was that_?” is the question Stiles finally settles on. It’s quiet, furious.

Derek squeezes his eyes shut, a hand coming up to press over his eyes, and shakes his head. He exudes self-loathing in a way Stiles doesn’t remember seeing in years, and it’s not exactly an encouraging sight.

“I’m sorry,” Derek says, not looking up, and Stiles feels like he’s going to be sick.

“That’s not an explanation,” he says. “You just fucking _kissed_ me, I _deserve_ an explanation.”

“I’m sorry _,”_ Derek says again. “I’m _sorry.”_

“What the _fuck_ are you even doing right now?” Stiles seethes, unsure if the gigantic lump in his throat is bile or whether he’s actually angry enough that he’s about to breathe fire. “Is this- what- are you- is this some sick attempt at _manipulation?!_ What the fuck are you even trying to _achieve_?!”

Stiles realizes with startling clarity that he’s about to cry again. There’s too much. He’s too confused, too angry, too miserable, and _too fucking in love_ for this to be anywhere near anything manageable.

He squeezes his eyes shut, so hard that lights dance in front of his eyes, and just wishes desperately that this night would just fucking _end._

“Stiles,” Derek says suddenly, something sharp in his voice, but Stiles is too far gone to pay him any attention. “Stiles, what are you- _Stop_!”

It's the panicked note in his voice that makes Stiles finally look up.

And he finds his room bathed in pale blue light.

That’s somehow emanating from _him._

Derek’s eyes are flashing red and he’s backing away from the glow like it’s a physical force. His hands are up and his shoulders are hunched. Then the window suddenly slams open.

And Stiles doesn’t know if this is luck or magic or if the universe has finally decided to throw him a fucking bone, but he grasps the chance with both hands.

“Leave,” he tells Derek, voice impressively firm. “Get out.”

And Derek-… Derek fucking _does._ In a weird mix of pushing force and something that might be compulsion, he takes a few shuddering steps and then is suddenly _thrown_ out the window.

Stiles stares.

“Fuck!” Derek exclaim, even as Stiles hears his boots hit the ground. “Stiles, what the hell is this?! You can’t just-!“

Stiles has no idea what happens. Suddenly it just feels like he’s throwing up, like all of his insides have suddenly decided that they want to become outsides, and the usual prickle of magic across his skin is just _pain._

And then suddenly everything goes quiet and Stiles only barely manages to stagger into bed.

Then everything goes black.


	5. Chapter 5

# V

The following morning, he wakes up feeling like he’s been run over by several semis and trampled by a moderately large minotaur, and everything he wishes for is just this once – _this one fucking time –_ to just get a few moments to catch his breath. A small space of time where he can recover from having his heart dug out of his chest with a rusty spoon and then spat on.

But that’s not the kind of life Stiles is living. 

School is non-optional because he’s got a test that needs re-taking today and, when he drags his ass out of bed at some ungodly hour in the morning, his father is – _despite_ his night-shift – waiting at the kitchen table with a platter of grilled cheese and a serious look on his face.

Stiles stuffs his face and endures maybe fifteen minutes of meaningful looks, gentle prodding, and reassurances that he can talk to him about _anything,_ really, before he stands up and pretends he has to hurry.

He grabs his bag, forces himself not to run, and then slams the door shut behind him.

Fiddling with keys he can’t tell apart because of the tears he can’t seem to blink away, he chews and chews a piece of toast that just seems to grow in his mouth. Then he finds the key, gets it in the lock, twists it, and turns around…

“Hi.”

Stiles jumps about four million feet into the air.

Scott looks a little like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands and a lot like he’s about to cry.

Stiles just stares.

“I’ve been so stupid,” Scott says, and the waterworks turn on.

Stiles walks to his car, shoves the keys in the door and gets inside. The passenger side door opens as he’s putting the keys into the ignition and Scott climbs into the seat, tears running down his face and still blabbing something about plans and not realizing and being sorry.

Stiles spent all of his emotional energy not ten hours prior and isn’t even sure whether he’s listening or not.

They get to the school and Scott climbs out, wiping his tears with the hem of his t-shirt. Stiles locks his jeep when Scott closes his door and starts walking without bothering to see what Scott’s doing. Stiles has AP Euro first, and Scott has APUSH, so they’re heading to opposite ends of the school anyway.

Except Scott just tags along.

Like they used to do, because they’d just get so caught up in talking about whatever that the detour was so very obviously worth it, to the point where it never even really entered consideration. It was just what they _did._

Very much past tense.

But Scott trails behind and talks and talks and Stiles doesn’t know what to _do_ with himself. He just walks quicker and quicker until he’s finally inside the classroom and shuts the door in Scott’s face.

The door has a window and, through it, he can see Scott’s wide eyes when he realizes what’s happened, the small pouty-frown thing he’s done since kindergarten when he’s trying not to burst into tears. And then he can actually see Scott grit his teeth against it, the rapid blinking of his eyes, a brief fogging of the glass as he blows out a shaky breath.

Then Scott meets his eyes and says: “You’re my best bro, Stiles. I love you. I’m sorry I’ve been so shitty about showing it but, if you’ll still have me, I promise I’ll do better. I _promise_.”

Then he turns and leaves.

They’re discussing the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire and Stiles isn’t even sure he’d be able to point to it on a map if his life depended on it. 

Finally, Mr. Schryver sighs and says: “You seem unusually distracted today, even by your standards, Mr. Stilinski.”

And Stiles stands up, chair scraping loudly against the floor, and says: “Actually I don’t feel too good.”

The beauty of your dad showing up in a cruiser, in full uniform, is that it dissuades otherwise overzealous staff from kicking up a fuzz about leaving school in the middle of the day after an already not inconsiderable uptick in unexcused absences. The uniform’s effectiveness is only upped by his dad’s ‘ _I’m handling this’_ -face, which he has brought out in full.

He smiles briefly at Ms. Espinoza, who is manning the reception, and says to Stiles: “That bug got to you, huh, son? I told you it would be your turn next – best get you back home.”

Stiles fucking _loves_ his father. _So_ fucking much. His dad even makes a point of telling Ms. Espinoza that Stiles won’t be coming in tomorrow, and isn’t it terrible how some people insist on coming into work and school even when they’re sick and risk infecting others?

He even gives Stiles some meaningful and judging eyebrows as he says it.

On the way home, it’s clear that his father has changed tactics.

He glances at Stiles as he’s putting the key in the ignition and says, in a voice Stiles is 100% sure is the exact same he uses on cornered criminals: “Is there anything you need to get off your chest, son?”

Stiles gives a minute shake of the head and his father just nods and turns on the radio at low volume.

During the ride home he tells Stiles about Lucinda at the station, who got a new kitten last week, and the particularly inventive parking violation that Deputy Williams came upon the other day.

Stiles hums at appropriate times in the story and, miraculously, that seems to be all that is required of him.

In short, the new strategy seems to be: don’t talk about it.

And they keep not talking about it for the whole car ride home.

And the whole evening after that.

And the next day, when Stiles stays home from school.

And the day after that, when he’s still home.

And the day after that, when he’s _still_ home.

It’s a fucking roller-coaster of a week, to be honest. His dad’s continued silence makes him feel like he’s watching a horror movie and he’s been bracing for a jump-scare for _years_. Every muscle aches with tension and, in some distant corner of his brain, a klaxon seems to be blaring constantly. On top of that situation, his phone sees more action since… since _ever,_ actually. Heartfelt, apologetic novels keep coming in from Scott at least five times per day, and Stiles can’t even bother opening those. Erica sends a succinct and lone “ _Sorry”_ on Wednesday and then starts harassing him with the banalities of her life the day after. Stiles opens those out of sheer morbid curiosity. Allison, Lydia, Boyd, Isaac, and even _Jackson_ send an apology text each – more reasonable in length than Scott’s, and then leave him alone after that. Stiles opens the first to come in – Allison’s – but only manages the first three words of that and leaves the rest unopened.

He answers absolutely none of them.

Then, Friday night, Derek texts him.

He knows immediately, because Derek has a different notification sound than everyone else. It’s not anything fancy or especially meaningful, just a _blip-blip_ instead of his usual _plong._ Despite it having been so long since he’s heard it that he doesn’t even immediately recognize the sound, he clearly has some sort of conditioned response to it; his heart seizes in his chest and his whole body is suddenly clammy, seconds before he’s even managed to consciously figure out what the sound _is_.

Stiles stares wide-eyed at the ceiling, lit by the light of the phone.

Then it dims, slowly, until he’s abruptly left in darkness and all he can see is memories, playing out with awful clarity before his eyes. The shame and embarrassment is too much and he hides beneath his blankets.

After a few moments, he sticks his hand out of the cocoon and fumbles around for the phone on the nightstand. He finds the charging cable, pulls that instead until the device is retrieved and his whole body is back in the moderate safety beneath his comforter. He closes his eyes for a moment, draws in a deep breath of the stale and uncomfortably warm under-blanket-air, and then taps the phone awake.

He has the phone’s privacy settings set so that nothing of the message shows up on the lock screen, so he actually has to enter the pin before he can see anything. He reads the entirety of it in his texting app’s preview without actually opening the conversation.

**Strange tracks in south-east part of forest. Checking it out.**

Stiles blinks.

Out of all the unlikely scenarios that had raced through his mind in the seconds between the message’s arrival and the moment he’d read it, this hadn’t been among them. Not even close.  He… doesn’t even really know what he’s feeling. Or what it means. Is Derek saying that he wants help? Or that he has it under control and Stiles doesn’t have to bother?

Stiles closes his eyes and lets the phone drop to the mattress without bothering to turn the screen off. He lays there for a moment and then decides: _fuck_ Derek. If he is trying to say that he wants help, he needs to be a bit fucking more clear than _that._ Stiles has _not_ forgotten, thank you very much, that Derek managed to misinterpret Stiles’ _explicit_ requests for help as some pathetic plea for Derek to pay attention to him.

No.

_No._

Stiles is going to do _nothing_. Derek can deal with this one all by his lonesome for all Stiles cares. It’s somebody else’s turn now.

With that decided he rolls over and settles in for sleep, and thinks _absolutely not at all_ about what horrors this newest installment of Monster of the Week might bring and what the consequences of Stiles neglecting it could be.

After a fitful night, Saturday arrives and Stiles hasn’t been out of his pajamas since Tuesday’s ill-advised attempt at school-going.

He stumbles down the stairs and finds his dad in a similar state, slips down into the chair opposite him at the kitchen table.

“Morning,” he means to say, but what tumbles out instead is: “I’m sorry.”

His dad stops with his mug of coffee halfway to his lips and frowns. “Sorry about what, son?”

And Stiles cover his eyes with his hands and has to try very hard not to cry because he doesn’t know where to _begin._

“About lying,” he finally pushes out, “so much.”

And then he doesn’t close his mouth quickly enough to stop the sob from slipping out.

“Oh, kid,” his father says, and drags his chair around the table so he can put and arm around Stiles' shoulders.

And Stiles- _fuck,_ Stiles hasn’t planned this at all, feels like he hasn’t even _begun_ to figure out what he’s going to tell his dad, but it seems like some other force has taken over his body and decided: _everything._

It comes out in a jumbled and incoherent mess. The monsters he has fought mingles with stupid school assignments he’s sat up all night to complete. He jumps between finally putting voice to all the options he’s thought about why he’s not good enough to have friends and telling his dad about how scared he’s been about being too late to save people. It’s guilt and angst and anger and loneliness and Stiles can’t even piece it into coherence himself and a distant part of him wonders how the hell his father is supposed to.

And then things he didn’t even know he’d been thinking come slipping out, ringing painfully true when spoken loud: how he’s not sure how much longer he can keep it up; how he doesn’t want to be alone all his life; how he’s magic seems to have been growing exponentially of late and that it’s scaring him; that he doesn’t know what’s worse – leaving his dad or his dad leaving him, because what is Stiles supposed to do when there’s _no one?_

Interspersed between all of it is an endless repetition of “ _I’m so sorry”_ and _“I don’t want to move, dad”._

Pretty much all of this Stiles says with his head in his arms on the table because he is a coward and doesn’t want to look in his father’s eyes as he reveals all his lies.

But his father’s hand remains steady on his shoulder the whole time until Stiles finally seems to run out of words.

When the silence stretches long enough that it’s clear that Stiles has nothing more to say, his father pats him gently on the back and picks up his neglected coffee. Stiles is still hiding his face, but the small sound his father makes as he takes a sip is enough to tell him that the coffee has grown cold.

Stiles takes a beep breath, wipes his tears on one arm and his snot on the other, and then straightens up. Without looking up he takes the cup from his father and wraps his hands around it. The porcelain is cold at first, but after only a couple of seconds the liquid inside is steaming.

“Here,” he says, holding it out to his dad, finally daring to glance up. “It’s warm now.”

There’s a small crease between his father’s eyebrows, but he doesn’t… look angry. A small breath of relief escapes Stiles, though he doesn’t dare count on being in the clear.

And then his dad takes the cup from him and says: “I’m proud of you, Stiles.”

Stiles draws back, feels his face heat for some reason. “It’s just heating coffee. Not really all that different from fireballs and that’s-“

“Not the coffee,” his dad says, putting his hand back on Stiles’ shoulder. “Although I appreciate the gesture. I meant _you_. I’m proud of the person that you have become.”

Stiles face _burns_ and he feels like he’s about to crawl out of his skin. “I don’t- what do- I’m not- I-…” He swallows his stuttering and manages to push out: “ _Why?”_

Something like sadness mingles into his father’s expression. “ _Stiles_ … Because you’ve given so much of yourself just to help other people. Because you’ve worked so hard. Because you’ve been clever enough to figure out what to do, and done it well enough that you haven’t gotten any serious injuries. Because you’ve gone through something very difficult and still managed to handle it all alone for so long. Because you were brave enough to tell me about it. Because you’re my _son.”_

Tears slip out of the corners of his eyes and he can see his father’s mouth tighten in a way that he thinks means that his father has to work to keep back his own.

“Believe me, I-… I am _not happy_ that you’ve been through this and there’s no way things will continue like this under my watch. And, yes, I wish you had told me earlier, and there’s _definitely_ a very stern talking to in Scott’s future, but… you’ve been brave, and strong, and clever, and frankly I think that your friends doesn’t deserve you.“ His father takes a deep breath and then lets it out slowly. “I don’t want to be angry at you for this. I am… _sad_ … that you’ve kept thighs from me, and I never want you to feel like _you_ have to protect _me,_ but… I understand. Why you’ve made the choices you’ve made. Especially considering what happened to your mother…”

Stiles didn’t think he could cry any harder, but suddenly he is.

His father’s voice sounds thick, too, when he speaks: “You’re an adult, Stiles, and I understand better than anyone that there’s no keeping you from something that you’ve set your mind to. I’m not going to force you to move – I hope I never have to _force_ you do _anything_. I’m not going to punish you, either, or tell you that you can’t do things. I’m just-… just _asking_ you that things change, now. That we talk about how we’re going to do this, _together._ How you’ll let me help keep _you_ safe.”

Stiles throws himself at his dad, burring his face in his neck and hugging him as tight as he possibly can. His dad hugs back, just as tight.

“I just want to be a part of your life, Stiles. I just want to know things. I just want to _help.”_

And the response that comes out of Stiles' mouth is: “I’m in love with Derek.”

And it’s not what he meant to say, doesn’t contain anything of gratitude and relief that it should, _isn’t something he’s ever spoken out loud_. It’s wrong and awful and shocking and panic seizes his whole body so firmly that it even shuts down his crying.

For a terrifying moment, the kitchen is absolutely silent.

“Oh _kid_ ,” his dad says, then, and it’s both a laugh and a sob. “You never do make it easy for yourself, do you?”


	6. Chapter 6

# VI

Scott shows up Sunday afternoon, which is an uncharacteristic show of restraint on Scott’s part.

Stiles meets him outside and doesn’t let him through the door. Then he punches him. Just once, in the stomach, as hard as he can without holding _anything_ back. It’s kind of a dick move, even with everything Scott has put him through, but Scott is a fucking werewolf and Stiles punches doesn’t actually matter.

Scott’s pout grows ever so slightly larger and he rubs at the spot.

“I can’t forgive you,” Stiles says, meeting his eyes unflinchingly.

There’s a beat of silence and then the tears well up in Scott’s eyes. A small sound, suspiciously like a clipped whine, escapes his throat. To his credit, though, he doesn’t try to protest. He just blinks furiously and nods.

“Okh- Okay. That’s- I-“

“Now,” Stiles interrupts, before Scott starts to babble, squeezing his eyes shut. “Yet. I can’t forgive you _yet._ Maybe not ever. Definitely not now. I don’t-…”

Stiles can’t really finish the sentence. Can’t find the words to express how he doesn’t know if he can trust that Scott actually _wants_ to be with him, trust him not to leave him behind again. How he’s not sure how he would survive another time like this. How he’s kind of expecting there to be another time and is only offering this much because he knows Scott well enough to be certain that Scott’s conscience will kill him if he doesn’t get a chance to try to make things better.

“Go to the kitchen,” he says instead, stepping aside. “Dad wants to yell at you.”

Scott’s eyes grow wide with fear, but he nods and does as instructed.

Stiles stays outside on the porch with the door closed but can hear his father’s voice loud and clear anyway. His dad is no doubt more effective in inflicting pain with his words than Stiles was with his fist.

Eventually, the door opens again and Scott comes out with blood-shot eyes and snot and tears in roughly equal measure running down his face.

“I’ll be better,” he says, for the thousandth time, to Stiles as he leaves. “I _promise.”_

“Yeah,” says Stiles. “Okay.”

Then he stands up and goes inside.

~

That Monday, he goes back to school and to his classes and to lunch period, where they’re all just _sitting there_ , at the usual table, like they haven’t been curiously absent for months. Because they’re all werewolves – or very used to hanging around them – they turn as one to look at him when he enters the cafeteria.

Stiles swallows his nausea and walks up to them.

Everyone apologizes again while Stiles is forced to stand there patiently. Even Jackson manages, after Lydia elbows him ruthlessly in the ribs: “Yeah, sorry or whatever, Stilinski”.

The worst part is that he actually sounds a little bit like he means it.

Stiles decides that _no._

Just- just… _fuck_ no.

He turns on the spot and eats his lunch in Mrs. Peterson’s classroom. He had her in AP Lit last year, at not at all this year, but she just raises her eyebrows as he slinks through the door and then goes back to her stack of papers.

Lydia is in his AP Chemistry class straight after lunch, though, and she puts her books beside his without any hint of hesitation.

“Thank god I’m allowed to talk to you again,” she says, slipping into the chair beside him and completely ignoring his startled look. “If Scott’s and Derek’s mutual hissy fit had lasted much longer, I would have literally had to kill them.”

She flicks her hair over her shoulder and opens her color-coded notebook.

Apparently, they’re ignoring his abscondence during lunch hour.

Stiles hasn’t managed to figure out a reply before she continues: “Not that they would have survived much longer with their heads _that_ far up their asses, anyway.”

Then the projector flicks on and the class starts.

Stiles feels like his chest is stuck in a vice.

Like the air is too thick for his throat, like his head is detaching from his shoulders, like a thousand ants are nibbling on his fingers, like he’s about to-…

Lydia’s fingers thread between his own and close down firmly.

“We’ve been idiots, Stiles,” she whispers, reaching over his notebook with pen in hand to give a plausible excuse for their quiet conversation. “And I’m never going to forgive myself for how badly I’ve treated you. If you’d let me, I’d like to make it up to you?”

She leans back just enough to meet his eyes.

Her voice was calm and firm and collected when she spoke, but like this Stiles can see a wetness in the corners of her eyes.

And then what’s he to do but nod?

With Scott and Lydia down, Stiles’ whole body tenses up the next time someone sits down next to him, braced for yet another emotionally draining apology he’ll feel forced to accept.

But it’s just Boyd.

Stiles stares at him, probably looking like a deer in the headlights.

Boyd meets his eyes evenly.

“Good to have you back,” he says, then, turning to face the whiteboard.

Stiles blinks.

“Yeah…” he says. “Yeah… you too.”

He manages to hold back from tacking on the _“I guess”_ at the end only very narrowly.

Erica has no fucking concept of personal space and sneaks into his fucking _room._

He’s barely survived the day, contemplated crying about fourteen times, and has just settled down in his pajamas with his laptop on the bed when the tell-tale rattling of the window begins.

His heart is immediately beating with the speed of fucking sound because that’s what _Derek_ used to do.

But Erica has none of the practiced ease that Derek used to display and thuds to the floor immediately after she’s through the window. She gets to her feet and brushes the hair out of her face with an annoyed motion, glancing at the windowsill like it has deeply offended her.

Then she turns towards Stiles.

The moment when she registers his expression, the determination leaves her. Stiles almost feels bad for how obvious it is, her shoulders drooping and face falling.

Almost.

Then Erica gathers herself and pushes on quickly: “Did you know that, like, half of the DC animated universe is on Netflix?”

Stiles wonders if he’s fallen asleep and this is a very vivid dream.

“No.”

The silence stretches and Erica is looking more and more uncomfortable.

“Well… do you wanna watch?” She asks, nodding towards him.

At his computer, he realizes a second later, looking down at it dumbly for a moment.

“I don’t have Netflix,” he says then, looking back up at her.

“Oh,” she says, shuffling from foot to foot.

His mouth is dry and the feeling that this _must_ be a dream becomes more pressing, to the point where an itch seems to spread over his skin.

“Maybe another time,” he says, finally, hoping that Erica will get the hint.

She does, tears immediately welling up in her eyes.

“Yeah,” she says roughly, “maybe another time.”

Then she’s out of the window again too fast for Stiles to think about formulating a response.

He falls asleep still resentful about feeling like the bad guy.

The rest of the week doesn’t end up too much better, to be honest. There’s enough apologizing going around that Stiles begins feeling like the sound of it physically grates in his ears, and everyone keeps being horribly awkward around him. Every interaction feels forced and everyone – though Scott especially – goes to such lengths to explicitly include him in everything that he’s near constantly tethering on the edge of yelling just to _please_ leave him the _fuck_ alone.

Then it’s Friday and time for the pack meeting and Stiles lets Scott drive him just so that he won’t turn around on his way there.

Derek’s house looks disturbingly _the same_ and everything smells painfully like _Derek._

Stiles keeps his eyes pinned to the floor, looking up just often enough to know that Derek is studiously avoiding so much as glancing at him.

Derek updates the pack about the tracks he’d found and, strangely enough, it seems like Stiles is the only one who had already been informed of their existence. He doesn’t quite know what to do with that piece of information, and is quickly distracted from thinking too much on it when Derek describes the creature he had found to them: an at-least fifteen foot tall humanoid thing, crowned like an enormous elk, and with bark-like skin that didn’t seem to take hardly any damage when Derek had slashed at it with his claws.

Derek had been forced to run.

Stiles resents the anxious little cramping thing his heart does.

Then Jackson groans: “ _Really_? Why do _we_ have to deal with this shit again? _”_

The sound of the chair hitting the floor is simultaneous to Jackson’s back slamming into the wall, and Stiles swears that he can hear wood cracking.

He’s so startled that he forgets how he’s been trying not to look straight at Derek and stares openmouthed at him as he holds Jackson up by his throat. He’s not even saying anything, just growling so loudly that it sounds like he’s got a whole V8 in his chest.

Lydia is the first to snap out of the stunned silence.

“Let go, Derek,” she says, getting to her feet. “ _Let him go._ You know perfectly well that’s not what he meant.”

Derek turns on _her_ then, eyes crimson and fangs bared.

But Lydia has always had nerves of steel and doesn’t back down an inch.

Several tense seconds pass, then Derek slowly lowers Jackson to the floor.

He draws a wheezing, shaky breath, eyes still yellow. He coughs slightly, and then he looks up at _Stiles_ and says:

“Sorry. I forgot.”

And Stiles knows, then, that the whole fucking world has gone certifiably insane.

The evening concludes rather quickly after that, with regular patrols in the forest being the agreed upon measure for the moment. Derek has the most shifts and Stiles has none, but neither does any of the humans so he doesn’t really have an issue with it.

He doesn’t have the nose or the ears for patrols, anyway.

Lydia grabs his elbow just as he’s pulled on his jacket.

“Does Tuesday work?”

Stiles blinks owlishly at her.

“Research,” she says. “We need to do it. Does Tuesday work?”

“Stiles doesn’t have to do any research if he doesn’t want to,” Scott jumps in, rather mulishly. “He can sit this one out.”

Lydia sends him a withering look. “Because trying to exclude Stiles from monster-hunting has worked so well in the past, has it, McCall?”

Scott shrinks back immediately and Stiles looks between the two of them with a frown.

“You know what, let’s try a novel idea,” Lydia says, voice now even more scathing. “Let’s _ask_ him.”

She swivels to him and Stiles takes an instinctive step back, even though he doesn’t seem to be the focus of her ire.

“Stiles, would you, by any chance, be interested in _not_ involving yourself in the process of getting rid of this monster?”

She poses the question almost rhetorically but it quickly becomes clear, from both hers and Scott’s expectant looks, that they’re waiting for an answer.

And the reasonable thing would obviously be to say yes. To sit back and let the people with superpowers deal with this, to calm his father’s frayed nerves and stay home and safe. Fuck, maybe even catch up on some schoolwork.

But his whole being revolts at the very notion.

“I… no,” he says, finally. “Not really interested in that, no.”

“Great,” Lydia says, glaring at Scott meaningfully. “So, Tuesday after school, then?”

The idea of company during his research-binges feels foreign now, but he knows rationally that they work well together.

He nods. “Sure.”

“Perfect,” Lydia says, leaning forward to kiss him on the cheek. “I look forward to it.”

Then she’s out the door, Jackson in tow.

~

And Stiles’ life kind of… _resumes._

It’s not like everything was before, he doesn’t _feel_ like he did before, but it is as though someone came in and forced them all to go back on script again. Lydia _does_ show up that Tuesday, and they work as well together as they have always done. They figure out that the creature is most likely a Leshy, and it’s not even that hard. The wolves handle the tracking, and that they have a rotation going means that it isn’t too big of a problem when it turns out that a Leshy, for how big it’s supposed to be, is surprisingly hard to find.

In school, he slowly gets used to having company again. To always having a partner for group-projects and someone to update him on missed homework. Not that he misses that much homework anymore – the Leshy seems to be the only Big Bad around at the moment, and others are keeping an eye on that.

His desperate reliance on make-up work to keep his grades up decreases.

Scott starts coming over again, more or less uninvited, and digs out Stiles’ old GameCube and decides that they need to play through Super Mario Sunshine a fourteenth time. They don’t really talk that much about what’s been going on, and Stiles is mostly grateful.

He can’t quite manage to shake the feeling that everyone is interacting with him out of a sense of obligation and poor conscience.

A month passes, and Derek’s run-in remains the only time any of them has seen the Leshy. They still find plenty of tracks, though, broken branches and packs of smaller animals behaving in strange ways.

Erica shows up again in his bedroom, roughly five weeks after the first time, managing a marginally more graceful entrance this time.

“Justice League Dark,” she says, almost like it’s a threat.

“Hi,” Stiles replies, staring at her. “I still don’t have Netflix.”

She narrows her eyes at him. Then she shoves her hand in her pocket and pulls out a yellow post-it.

“I stole Derek’s log-in.”

Erica has her hair up in a pony-tail. She’s wiped the make-up she wore at school off and she’s in sweat-pants instead of jeans. She looks less… _firm,_ like this, and Stiles thinks about last time when she left crying.

Thinks about how the magical perimeter he set up around the house alerted him of someone crossing its borders over 20 minutes ago, and the lengthy silence between then and now.

“Good move,” he says, eventually, moving to make room for her on the bed.

And that’s how Stiles ends up watching Justice League Dark with Erica snuggled up underneath his arm, head leaning against his chest.

When the credits finally roll, she clicks on _Justice League vs. Teen Titans_ without consulting him.

“I don’t care what stupid argument they use,” Erica says about an hour in, sounding halfway asleep, “if Scott and Derek ever have another apocalypse of man-pain, I’m siding with you.”

Stiles’ father finds them like that in the morning, Erica’s head on his shoulder and some of her hair in his mouth. Astonishingly, Stiles is the one woken up by the soft opening of the door, and so is the one who gets to share a long moment of awkward eye-contact with his father.

The fact that Erica sleeps through it postpones the conversation about it until later.

“So…” his father says from the kitchen after Stiles has seen Erica out the door.

“We were both fully clothed, dad,” Stiles says, taking a seat opposite his father. “ _On top of_ the covers.”

“Still,” his father says, stirring his coffee with a spoon. “I’d appreciate it if you could refrain from sneaking girls in through your bedroom window in the future.”

“She snuck _herself_ in,” Stiles points out. “Also, this is Erica we’re talking about – you’re free to try to persuade her to _refrain_ all you want.”

The heavy sigh that escapes his father tells on the fact that it’s not a fight he’s expecting to win.

“Besides,” Stiles says, already wondering why the _hell_ he’s bringing this up voluntarily. “It’s not like-… I’m-… Well, there’s Derek, isn’t there?”

He tries for a rueful smile, but he thinks it mostly ends up being a grimace.

His father stops stirring and looks at him.

“If there’s anything I-“

“I know, dad,” Stiles says, waving his words away.

Erica keeps coming over, and the only fight his father manages to win is to get her to use the front door instead of Stiles’ bedroom window. Stiles is grateful because he can’t seem to uncouple the noise of it sliding open from the memory of Derek.

Derek, who is still just about as absent from Stiles’ life as before.

Who keeps not looking at him during the pack meetings, keeps going silent when Stiles enters a room.

The only contact they have are the painfully succinct texts he keeps getting about tracks and scents and noises in the forest.

Stiles never replies.

 


	7. Chapter 7

# VII

When the Leshy is found it’s just a regular Saturday.

The text arrives in the group chat at 8:47 PM.

He and Scott are in his bedroom, an empty carton with a greasy pizza-stain between them, and onlyStiles has the sound on his phone turned on.

He hears the _blip-blip_ and hands the controller over to Scott immediately. Scott fumbles the reception, the FLUDD sputtering off and sending them crashing to the ground, resetting their progress towards the Shine Sprite they were going for.

“Aw, man,” Scott complains, but Stiles pays him no mind, focused on getting his phone out of his pocket.

The moment it’s unlocked he’s on his feet.

“We need to go,” Stiles says, already heading towards the drawer where he keeps his machete. “Check your phone.”

The text is one sent via an app that Stiles had forced the pack to install about a year and a half ago for emergency purposes: with only a few clicks, on large and easy to hit buttons, it shared your location with a preselected list of contacts. There’s a hyperlink below the coordinates that will direct him to a map with a pin in it, but Stiles has seen slight variations of the numbers often enough that he can get a rough idea without even clicking it.

“Shit,” Scott says, once he has his phone in hand as well.

“South-east,” Stiles says, pulling a sweater over his t-shirt. “Must be something with the Leshy.”

“We didn’t even _have_ a patrol today!” Scott complains. “What the hell is he even _doing_ out there?”

“Dunno,” Stiles replies, “but it likely means that he’s there alone, so get your ass in gear.”

Scott grumbles all the way, but he’s fast, and they’re out the door and in the jeep in about three minutes, having yelled goodbyes to his dad over their thundering steps down the stairs.

Allison had been spending the night with Erica, and they'd texted to say that they'd bring along Isaac and Boyd in their car, so it’s still just him and Scott when the road into the forest finally becomes impassable to his jeep and they’re forced to stop.

Either they are the first to arrive, or Jackson took another route with his car. Lydia, Stiles knows, is stuck at the family function she’s been complaining about all week long.

“I can hear something,” Scott says, almost the moment Stiles kills the engine.

“Go,” Stiles says, jumping out of the car.

“What about you?” Scott protests, even as he’s glancing in the direction of where Stiles presumes he can hear the sounds coming from. “I could-“

“It’ll slow you down if you carry me,” Stiles says, shaking his head. “Better to get Derek backup quick.”

Scott still hesitates.

“ _Go!”_ Stiles yells, shooing him away.

Blessedly, that’s all it takes. Scott shifts and takes off through the trees at a pace that Stiles could never hope to match.

Stiles still runs, though. Runs through soft and uneven moss in the direction his magic is tugging him, and there's a feeling in his chest that hasn't been there like it is now in  _months:_ worry.

He hates it.

No one but him has been in danger for ages.

He’s not been running for long before Erica, Isaac, and Boyd tears past him, barely acknowledging him before they’re out of sight again.

And then Stiles can hear it.

It sounds like a frozen lake. A deep, groaning, creaking sound echoing between the trees, cracks and snaps interspersed. There’s a flock of ravens circling overhead, their cawing and fluttering wings an endless backdrop. From the forest floor comes a frantic and constant chitter, a cacophony from critters unseen.

Then he spots them.

Derek is already fully shifted, the black wolf he turns into as shockingly large as always.

In front of the Leshy, though, he looks tiny.

It looks almost exactly like the drawings he’s seen, and yet they don’t seem to have captured it at all. It’s well over 15 feet tall, just like the books had said, and crowned with horns like a deer. But it’s _huge_ in a way that the books just haven’t been able to convey. Its body is like a literal tree, arms overlong and branchlike. The horns on its head sprout as thick as Stiles’ thighs, branching off and narrowing to points that looks terrifyingly sharp, reaching easily six feet in either direction.

It looks, more so than anything else Stiles has faced, like something out of a horror movie.

The face is the worst.

It’s elongated and thin like a horse’s, the bark over it white and almost skeletal. And there’s something horrifyingly, gut-wrenchingly, _human_ about it.

The eyes are utterly, utterly black – and yet they seem to constantly catch the light in strange ways. They follow Derek as he paces back and forth in front of the creature, careful to stay out of reach of its long arms.

“What’s going on?” Stiles asks Isaac, who’s the closest to him.

He has to raise his voice to be heard over all the noise from the animals around them.

Isaac shakes his head. “He’s been completely wolfed out since before we got here, so I don’t know much more than you do. Looks like he might have done some damage, though.”

Isaac nods towards the Leshy, and at first Stiles can’t even see what he’s referring to. Then he spots it – gouges in the bark, almost invisible to his human eyes because the flesh underneath seems to be wood as well.

“But Derek’s been hurt, too,” Isaac ads, then, and Stile’s stomach constricts.

“Where?” he demands. “How?”

“I don’t know,” Isaac replies, shrugging slightly, “I can just smell the blood.”

Derek’s growling suddenly rises in pitch, and then Scott jumps and throws himself on the Leshy’s back. It emits another one of those noises like creaking ice, and then shrugs Scott off its back. Scott falls, but quickly gets to his feet and leaves behind gouges in the bark.

It’s enough that the Leshy, feet unmoving, turns away from Derek to look at Scott instead. Then its eyes sweep over them all, halting briefly over Stiles.

And, during that moment, Stiles feels like all warmth leaves his body.

Then it's over. The creature moves on from him and turns its attention back to Derek, and Stiles can’t understand how Derek can _stand_ it.

Then suddenly he feels something on his leg. He yelps and tries to swat at it, but it’s too fast and then suddenly it’s on his chest.

It’s a squirrel.

Stiles is so shocked that he completely forgets to be scared for a moment.

Then the little thing goes for his face.

Stiles yelps and flings the creature away from him with magic. It flies far, far further than necessary or intended, and bounces on the mossy ground. Stiles barely has time to regret his excessively forceful blow, though, before the squirrel has scurried up a nearby tree.

“Fuck!” Jackson yelps, and Stiles hadn’t even noticed that he’d arrived. “Deer!”

It doesn’t sound like too much of a problem until its careening through the trees with his head bowed, horns on its head lethal. The wolves jump out of the way with relative ease, but Stiles has to resort to another force-push-thing to make it turn away.

Barely has it passed them before it loops back and goes for another try.

And then the ravens start diving.

“I’ll deal with the animals!” Stiles yells, ducking and diving to escape beaks and claws. “You focus on the Big Bad!”

“There’s too many!” Scott protests immediately, standing way too close to the Leshy for his attention to be diverted so completely. “You can’t-“

“ _Do it!”_ Stiles shouts, Derek roaring almost simultaneously to bring Scott’s attention to the gigantic arm swinging at him.

Stiles watches, between the gaps in his arms, just long enough to see Scott roll away before focusing on his task.

The ground looks like it’s moving, now – mice, rats, squirrels, even a couple of rabbits all converging on the members of the pack, the birds dive-bombing from above. Bugs, too, Stiles realizes and shakes his leg with a grimace, seems to have joined in the attack.

An arrow zooms past and fells the deer, and Allison’s arrival is welcome, but barely has she come into view before clumps of animals break off to focus on her. Swatting and yelling in frustration, she’s too distracted to aim.

The wolves have their claws out, but the animals are small and fast and hard to hit.

It’s up to Stiles.

All up to Stiles.

He remembers what he’s read, that Leshy have powers over the animals in the forest, but he hadn’t expected for it to be like _this_ , like a literal fucking army. He doesn’t really have time to dwell on that, though, just has to come up with a way to counter it. The book had seemed to describe some sort of hypnosis-like ability, and to break that…

Stiles brings his hands together.

The resulting clap is like a gunshot.

Erica, who’s the closest to him, gives a pained yelp at the loudness, but it seems to have the desired effect: several of the animals, birds especially, seem to snap out of their trances as their baser instincts command them to flee.

For a moment it seems like there’s going to be a cascading effect, more and more animals runnig as they notice others of their kind bolting.

But then the Leshy groans and creaks, and it’s _angry,_ and almost all the animals turn back again and resume their attack.

And Stiles has caught the Leshy’s attention.

It twists, turning towards him, arm extended like it’s about to throw a spell at him. Then Derek is suddenly jumping, hanging from that very same arm, bark cracking between his powerful jaws.

Sufficiently distracted, the Leshy swats at him.

It allows Stiles to refocus his efforts on the task he’s promised to carry out, but the problem of how the hell he’s supposed to manage it remains. He has influenced animals before, sure, but that’s mostly been nudging them to be calm or to stay back when nothing much else is going on - like when he stole those rat babies and didn’t want the mom to bite him.

This is another thing entirely.

He still has to try, though.

So, try he does. Still keeping his arms over his head to shield himself form the ravens’ claws, he _pushes_ thoughts about _staying away_ to all the animals around him.

But it feels like the magical equivalent of bashing his fist against a concrete, utterly unyielding. _Maybe_ there’s a slightly diminished fervor in the mice launching at him but, if so, it is very marginal.

It’s not enough.

Not by a long shot.

Letting out a growl of frustration, he switches strategies, sending out a blast of pure force from his center.  

It works as well as before, sending the small and light animals flying. Some hit trees with terrible speed and die instantly. It’s not an effective approach on the whole, though – the moment the ones on top of him disappear, the ones behind them scurry up his legs and take their place. And there’s no chance that he can chase the others around and keep blasting; his magic will run out too fast.

Feeling a trickle of panic down his spine, he tries a shield instead – just a barrier between them and him. It works, and for a blissful moment he’s spared the scratching and biting and stinging.

Then he moves, and the shield does not move with him.

He yelps as teeth and claws find purchase again, forces the shield to snap back around him. It does, and he gets another reprieve. Concentrating hard and lifting his arm very slowly, he tries again, wills the shield to move with him. It… _kind of_ works, the thing stuttering upwards with his movements like it’s a game with shit framerate.

Maybe it could be a viable strategy with time and practice.

Stiles has neither, though, and no chance of sustaining shields like this for the whole pack, their movements unpredictable to him. It’s not going to help.

_Stiles can’t help._

A cold creep of hopelessness has started, swirling together with the panic, when suddenly he spots the moon above the treetops.

_The moon._

He can’t make the animals _stop_ attacking them while they’re under the Leshy’s control, but maybe…

_Over there_ , Stiles thinks at the animals, _over there, go get it!_

Pushing his own will on the animals, overriding the Leshy, obviously hadn’t worked; Stiles simply did not have that kind of magical power, going toe-to-toe with what was basically a woodland demi-god. But what he _could_ do was to let it strike a glancing blow; to accept the command as unyielding and then nudge it in a new direction.

The classic underdog move: take your enemy’s strength and use it against them.

By the rules of epic stories and fairy tales, it is a sure triumph – brains over brawn, Stiles quick thinking saving the friends that thought him useless, winning the day and proving them wrong.

But, that has not ever been the kind of story that Stiles lives in.

_Over there,_ Stiles thinks as hard as he can, _it’s getting away!_

The sensation of his seeping magic is cold, somehow, and he seems to be able to _feel_ it dragging along the Leshy’s. The fatigue eats at his body and he grows unsteady on his feet.

But nothing happens.

Then, a flutter of brittle wings among the ravens’ – the moths, perhaps by some intrinsic vulnerability, drawn towards the light.

For a moment, his hope soars.

Then another moment passes.

And another.

And then the realization comes crashing down upon him: the moths were not the beginning of something, not the first to yield to his will.

They were the _only_.

He lets the command go with a frustrated scream, his body erupting in flames.

Squeaks and yaps and squawks, terrified voices yelling his name. Stiles hears nothing, just the deafening roar of fire.

The animals close to him – though far enough away to not have immediately have perished – flee, their singed feathers and fur apparently finally enough for their natural urges to win over magical compulsion. Stiles barely notices their flight – all he can focus on is the Leshy.

He throws a fireball.

It hits the monster square in the back, but it’s like the fire is water, dripping down its wooden skin without leaving marks.

Another frustrated sound escapes him, this one closer to a growl, and be throws again, stalking towards the creature.

He barely notices Scott and Derek hurrying to get out of the way.

The second fireball is just as a precise strike as the first, and has just as little an effect. The Leshy begins turning towards him, though, and then those black voids are focused upon him.

But the flames still flicker like a curtain before Stiles’ eyes, and all he wants is to see the Leshy _burn._

He throws again, and again, and _again,_ all the while moving closer and closer.

The fire breaks like droplets each time.

When Stiles stops, he’s standing too close – too close for his weak and feeble human body to do anything if the Leshy decides to strike at him.

He pants, staring up at the creature, and with each breath the fire around him diminishes. He doesn’t pay it any attention, staring up at the untouched wood, and then the last of it winks out.

With the roar of it gone he notices, distantly, that the cacophony has silenced. That there are no new claws and beaks descending on his skin.

Still staring into the glittering blackness of the Leshy’s eyes, he knows, just _knows,_ that it’s because the monster has decided that it wants to deal with them itself.

Wants the _pleasure_ of it.

It’s creaking again, that sound like a frozen lake, and there’s a rhythm to it. A rhythm like laughing.

It feels like something inside Stiles breaking. A white-hot torrent of fury and impotence and fear pouring out of him, blinding.

And the Leshy _burns._ White-blue flames licking as high as the trees around them, hot enough to sting at Stiles’ face and force his eyes closed.

For several long moments, the forest is as bright as daylight.

Then everything is silent, in that almost dizzying way that only follows something very loud. It is broken intermittently by the incongruously homely noise of a fireplace cracking and sparking, and the thinner branches sticking up from the Leshy’s body burn like candle wicks.

Stiles is so empty that there almost seems to be a negative pressure within him, like the contents of his stomach are trying to _drag_ themselves up and out of him. His vision swims, but he doesn’t dare move. He stands, breathing heavily, staring at the creature with eyes still stinging from the terrible heat.

Finally, Scott breaks the silence. “Is it…?”

Derek cuts him of with a low and warning growl.

And Stiles knows then, really, that he’s failed again. That he’s managed something new and stupid that has been of help to no one.

But a vain hope clings on for a moment longer.

Then Leshy moves. A crack along the joint of the shoulder is the first sign of what is to come. Then the soot _shatters,_ as though it had simply been a layer painted on.

And then Stiles doesn’t have a single shred of hope left within him.

In the next moment he’s stuck, flying through the air. The pain of it doesn’t even register until he’s crashing to the ground again, rolling and rolling, thankfully loosing a lot of speed before his back smacks into the trunk of a tree.

For what feels like an eternity, it’s like a steel cage has locked down his torso and his battered lungs simply refuse to let any air in or out.

Then it finally passes and he gasps for breath and, _shit,_ something is _not_ right.

Barely has he processed that, though, before the earth beneath him moves. _Snakes,_ he thinks, and when he realizes what it actually is it’s already too late.

Roots, tree roots, closing around him like a skeletal hand, pressing his face to the ground. It forces his head to turn in order not to be smothered by the forest floor and, even as his cheek is pressed down into the puddle of blood that’s dripped from his mouth, he realizes that the others are fighting.

It’s confusing, at first, because everyone seems to have switched places. Stiles is _certain_ that the pack had been behind him when the Leshy had been burning, and that he must have flown past them when the creature hit him. But, now, the Leshy is the one closest to him, the pack attacking from beyond it.

_It came for me,_ Stiles thinks, thoughts somehow feeling distant, _it came to finish the job._

The forest is darker now that his fires have gone out, only the moonlight left. There’s spots dancing in front of his eyes, too, and he has trouble making them focus. The wolves are nearly invisible in the night, but the Leshy is plain to see, even in the blur, by the embers still caught in its form. It’s like a cloud of fireflies, swaying back and forth as the monster attacks the pack.

Stiles frowns.

His brain still feels sluggish, but it’s like something about the sight in front of him has pinged something in his brain. Like it’s supposed to mean something.

Realization strikes him with the next breath he takes, the smell of smoke clear in the air.

Smoke. Smoke and ash – neither produced by a purely magical fire.

Stiles _had_ managed to hurt it.

He gets it confirmed moments later, when, in a sweep that nearly takes Boyd’s head off, the Leshy’s arm catches in a moonbeam.

And it’s _thinner._

Barely has the jubilation taken hold in his chest before he spots something else, though: something moving along the arm.

Stiles blinks desperately, trying to clear the blur and get a better look. He puts his palms to the ground and tries to push himself up, but the roots don’t even flex and something is ribcage is _not_ feeling okay, and he falls back to the ground with a pathetic whimper of pain and frustration.

The sparks remain, dancing as the Leshy moves, and something about it puts knots in the pit of Stiles’ stomach, though he can’t quite understand why.

His brain isn’t working. His whole body feels too slow.

Then Derek suddenly jumps for the Leshy’s throat, and it really says something about the massive size and strength of his fully shifted form that he makes it that high, sinking his teeth into the creature. It stumbles backwards from the weight, the force, of him. Then it emits one of its rumbling noises and wraps its branch-like fingers around Derek’s middle, throwing him to the side like a child annoyed with a toy.

Derek manages to twist and land on his feet without taking any noticeable damage, but the relief of that is quickly overshadowed by what the Leshy’s closer proximity has allowed him to see.

It’s vines.

Vines that writhe up the creature’s arms, legs, whole body, wrapping and twisting like bad CGI. Stiles watches the new layer of armor grow in, erasing what little damage he has managed to inflict, with mounting fear. Then he spots something else. Something far worse.

Small, red berries appearing in the gaps between the wood.

“Rowan,” he breathes, voice hoarse and cracking. “Ash- mountain…”

Before he’s pieced the full thought together, though, the Leshy _flicks_ its arm out and a thin branch cracks like a whip through the air.

Erica _screams._

Her shirt is torn where she was hit and the skin underneath already bleeding.

Boyd roars and throws himself at the Leshy.

It swats him away easily and Boyd falls to the ground gasping.

Stiles can see the others tense, weary and waiting.

The Leshy stands huge and unmoving, embers like specks of glittering stars, and Stiles sluggish brain finally pieces together his terrible mistake. Like an invisible bellow is feeding them, the glow pulses bright along the Leshy’s arm and smoke curls in the air.

Stiles desperately tries to _pull,_ tries to snuff the burn and undo his mistake.

But he just gets that fist-against-concrete feeling again and the Leshy doesn’t even appear to notice.

It just stands there with its back to him, like a macabre statue, allowing its body to smolder.

A sudden gust of wind rushes through the trees and flames dance to life.

Then ashes begin swirling through the air.

And Stiles thinks that this might be how they all die.

The wound Erica took isn’t healing, and Boyd keeps favoring one side and gritting his teeth as he moves. And Stiles _knew_ it wouldn’t be good when he spotted the rowan growing over the Leshy, but he didn’t know it would be like _this._

The Leshy has let the flames die back down, but ash is still rising from it. It’s not quite as bad as wolfsbane, but clearly not far from it. The ash hangs unnaturally heavy in the air, too, getting in their lungs with every breath they take. Within minutes, they’re all hacking and coughing, hunched over like the soot on their shoulders is weighing them down. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Leshy is very clearly doing something to the wood itself, too – even glancing blows do too much damage, the bones of Isaac’s wrist bared as he holds his arms up to protect his face from a snapping vine.

Allison is the only one moderately okay, with a scarf up over her mouth and nose, her humanity sparing her the supernatural effects of the ash floating in the air. But her humanity also means that she has very little chance of inflicting any damage on the monster. Sure, she has arrows and a knife, and a lot of skill wielding both, but what can such things do against something like _this?_

Stiles sees the panic in her eyes as they flick between the pack and the Leshy, taking stumbling steps backwards.

Then she looks at him.

And Stiles realizes that their only chance of surviving this is to flee… and that they’re not going to. 

Because _he_ is trapped.

He squeezes his eyes shut and tears mingle with the blood and dirt on his face.

It’s _exactly_ like last time, exactly what Derek had been furious about when he’d slammed him against his car. Stiles had been stupid and thoughtless and _weak,_ and now he’s put all of them at risk. All of them are in danger because of _him._

As if to emphasize this point, a sharp yelp sounds through the woods.

Stiles’ eyes fly open.

And he gets to witness what looks like the beginnings of a massacre.

The pack has clearly realized the same thing he has – that they need to run, but that they’re not going to without him. They keep trying to round the Leshy to get to him, but each attempt is thwarted with macabre ease. Jackson tries to dart back further into the forest to take the long way around, but a vine bursts out to the forest floor and wraps around his foot.

He falls to the ground screaming.

Watching him struggle to get free, Stiles realizes that they have another problem: the wood itself acts the same way a circle of mountain ash would.

They can’t cut through it.

Meaning that they won’t be able to free Stiles even if they get to him.

Meaning that their attacks won’t be able to hurt the Leshy, now completely wrapped in the greenish branches.

The wolves come to the same realization quickly, as their claws and teeth bounce off the invisible barrier with each attack. They change their strategy to be entirely defensive. A waiting game.

Waiting to see how long it takes them to die.

They’re all good at dodging, seeing the attacks as they come and jumping out of the way, but the soot falls like snow, and the wolves’ breathing grows steadily more labored. And their jumps soon begin falling short, their reflexes not fast enough to keep up.

The Leshy gets several hits in, and the soot mixes with blood.

More and more often, he sees their eyes going to him, and he prays that they realize that they have to leave him behind. He would yell it to them, but there is blood in his mouth and his throat feels raw and his brain as though it’s wrapped in cotton, and he doesn’t seem able to get the words out.

All he can do is watch.

Jackson is already incapacitated, the roots around his ankle seemingly impossible to loose, despite Allison’s attempts to hack at it with her knife. Isaac is next, a branch snapping down on his already wounded arm – the sound of the bone breaking echoing in the night. The four remaining wolves draw tighter, but Erica is unsteady on her feet and there’s a worrying amount of red on her clothes. Scott and Boyd seem better off, but Scott is bleeding from three parallel slashes to the face and Boyd still limping.

Derek’s dark fur hides the ash well, but his flanks are matte where they should be shiny, the wounds on his side not closing, and his head hanging low.

It wouldn’t be long, now.

Derek seems displeased with their new formation and tries to herd the others behind him, but they don’t appear to have it, keep pushing to stand alongside him. He growls at them, but they take no notice.

Stiles has the horrible feeling that the Leshy is _amused._

Then it swipes at them.

The movement is telegraphed, and they throw themselves out of the way, but Erica is too slow.

She takes the blow to the stomach, sails through the air, and doesn’t stir after she’s crashed through the ground.

Alison shrieks her name and runs to her.

The Leshy keeps attacking, this time aiming for Boyd, coming in from the side where he’s weak. He won’t be able to dodge.

Evidently, Derek has realized this too, because he jumps in between and takes the blow along his side.

The Leshy fights like a tree in a storm, now, big and sweeping motions, and Derek flies even further than Erica. He rolls and rolls, then smacks into a tree.

Stiles can’t see anything, his eyes overflowing with tears.

When he finally manages to blink them away, Derek is back on his feet, teeth bared and growling to keep the Leshy’s attention on him instead of Scott and Boyd. He moves towards it, but each step is a clear effort, right hind leg barely even touching the ground.

The Leshy rumbles, swipes again, again, and _again,_ and Stiles has no idea how Derek is still managing to move that fast. Scott and Boyd keep darting forward, trying to break its focus, but the Leshy just swats at them like flies and keeps its focus on Derek.

And it was ever only a matter of time.

Still, a broken noise escapes him when Derek is finally just a _little bit_ too slow and that whip cracks down with terrible speed and force over his back. His legs crumple underneath him, and the Leshy hovers like a grim reaper over Derek, but Derek doesn’t move. Boyd and Scott make a last futile attempt and throw themselves at it, and it focuses on them both just long enough to get them with one massive blow each.

They, too, remain on the ground.

Allison screams, loosen arrow after arrow, but even the ones that lodge themselves in the bark doesn’t seem to even warrant the creatures notice. It has turned back to the alpha and will not be distracted again.

They’re going to die.

They’re all going to die.

Stiles digs his fingers into the dirt, watching as the Leshy bends down over Derek. The vines on its arm are crawling again, the single one it has been using as a whip slowly being reinforced into terrifying sturdiness by others. Before long, it looks like a pike.

Stiles sobs, crushing the earth in his grip.

_He needs to do something he needs to do something he needs to_

Blackness eats at his vision, even as he strains to cling to consciousness.

_Please,_ he begs, tears running down his face, _please, I need to help, please, I can’t let them die!_

He sees the Leshy draw its arm back, preparing to stab.

He sees Derek close his eyes, bracing.

Bracing to _die._

And Stiles screams. Despite the blood in his mouth, despite the rawness of his throat, despite his broken lungs barely being able to draw breath… he screams. Digs his fingers deep into the ground and screams and screams.

And then blackness swallows him.


End file.
